Song for Night (7 page)

Mercy Is a Palm Turning
Out from the Heart

This woman’s eyes are cold and hard and dark like onyx and I wake straight into that gaze. One that reveals nothing and flinches from nothing; if I am death, she is ready. If I mean no harm, she will ignore me; I hope. My gesture is one of supplication and if she understands it, she doesn’t show it. Her gaze takes in my torn clothes, my haggard face, and the gun, and also the scapular that has come loose. I can’t make out what she is thinking.

I hesitate, letting her gaze wander over me as I scan the bank for any signs of other people. She appears to be alone. I return my eyes to her and search her for weapons. All she has is a long pole with a makeshift metal hook on the end. A bag stands by her feet and I see it is filling up with loot. Rings, watches, compacts, a handbag, some good shoes, jewelry, and with a shudder I realize what she is doing, or was doing before she happened upon me. She uses the hook to pull bodies onto the shore and robs them of their valuables. It is despicable what she is doing, I think, and wonder if I drifted into the bank or whether she pulled the canoe in with the intent of robbing me. Ghoul. At least when I rob, I rob the living, I think, feeling superior to her. But if she is ashamed by her profession, nothing in her face reveals it.

It is a bright day and my broken watch reveals nothing about the time. I can only guess it is about midday. I thank whatever gods or goddesses watched over me while I slept. There is a road behind the woman and I can’t tell if this is the one from yesterday or if I have drifted back to the bank with the roadblock. Nothing looks familiar.

The woman gives me one final look, makes the sign of the cross, and goes back to fishing for corpses as though she has dismissed me, as though with that token sign she has somehow rendered me invisible.

“Mother, where am I?” I try to signal, using the generic term for respect. But either she can’t see me anymore, doesn’t understand, or doesn’t want to. I get out of the canoe and walk toward her. She pauses and turns to look at me; the sun is directly in my face and I am squinting. She hesitates, then spits, almost shouting, “Tufia!” the old word for banishing spirits or bad things. I smile and something in my face softens her, and for a minute her eyes are pure tenderness and the look unsettles me, brings back memories of the first woman I raped, a woman her age, and I stumble back confused, wondering if she is real or if she is a ghost, an apparition drawn by the river goddess mami-wata from my guilt; to punish me. As I stagger back from her, my mind staggers back in time, but fragments are all I stumble over.

John Wayne was yelling at me. There were villagers running in panic. There were houses and huts burning. Also granaries. Bullets from indiscriminate guns cut down plants, animals, and people. The platoon was screaming. Ijeoma, the only girl among the attackers, stood to one side, watching, too afraid perhaps to cry. But something moved behind her eyes. John Wayne and I were standing in a room. A woman huddled under the bed.
Why do they do that?
I thought. Hiding under a bed never saved anyone. John Wayne pulled her out and threw her on the bed. Ripping her clothes off, he ordered me to rape her. I hesitated.

“You are the only one who hasn’t raped anyone yet!” he barked at me.

I wanted to ask him what this skirmish, this fight, this destruction of an innocent village had to do with our mission to defuse mines, but I knew better. I looked at the woman. My hesitation puzzled her and she stopped crying. John Wayne was angry at my insubordination and he pointed his gun at my head.

“Rape or die,” he said, and I knew he meant it. As I dropped my pants and climbed onto the woman, I wondered how it was that I had an erection. Some part of me was enjoying it and that perhaps hurt me the most. I entered the woman and strangely she smiled. I moved, and as much as I wanted to pretend, I couldn’t lie, I enjoyed it. The woman’s eyes were tender, as if all she saw was a boy lost. She stroked my hair tenderly, whispering as I sobbed: “It’s all right son, it’s all right. Better the ones like you live.” When I came, John Wayne laughed and put two rounds into the woman’s head, spraying my face with her blood. The woman died with that look of absolute tenderness in her eyes.

Ijeoma found me. She knew, but she had too much grace to say anything. That night, in the rubble of that village, while the others roasted a goat, she washed the blood from my face.

“You have the taste now,” she said.

I nodded. I knew what she meant. I was thirteen, armed and lost in a war with the taste for rape.

“I will save you,” she said.

And she did. She became my girlfriend and that night and every night after that, whenever we raided a town or a village, while the others were raping the women and sometimes the men, Ijeoma and I made desperate love, crying as we came, but we did it to make sure that amongst all that horror, there was still love. That it wouldn’t die here, in this place.

I return to the moment of that woman’s look and the look this woman is giving me here at the riverbank. I turn from her and run through the thick patch of tall grass on the bank, across the road, and make for the forest. I can still feel her eyes on me. I decide to rest and move closer to the town that must be nearby under the cover of darkness.

I climb a tree and doze.

Dreaming Is Hands Held
in Prayer over the Nose

Maybe this is true. That there are some of us who give love and some of us who take love; and that those who give can’t help giving just as those who take can’t help taking; and maybe this is what holds the world in balance.

I dream my hate comes back and she is a woman made of night dancing in the middle of a lake I have seen only in Grandfather’s stories and she has claws of fire and breath of ice and her laughter, as she turns in dance, is a band tight as a vice across my heart choking life from it, and as I am gasping for breath all I can think is,
What a thing of beauty she is, what a thing
. Then a light breaks in the east, over the lake, and approaches, an orb smaller than a star but no less bright. I see it is Ijeoma and she opens her arms and the woman made of my hate fills her, slowly extinguishing her light, and she falls from the sky, and as she falls, her light fading, the band around my chest loosens and I see her smile so sadly yet so full of love.

I wake to darkness. Breathing heavily I fumble for a cigarette and stick one in my mouth. In a fleeting kind of way, I wonder how come this pack never seems to run out, but then a deeper thought takes hold.

I need to find that town and my platoon.

I want to say a prayer for Ijeoma, but I feel silly. It is only a dream. I shake it off and head back to the road. In the dark it looks like it might lead to the underworld.

Shit.

Town Is Hands Making Boxes in the Air

A minnow skirting through weeds in a pool, a plane skims trees that ripple like a dense Afro. I pause and listen. From the engine pitch I can tell it isn’t a bomber, probably a Red Cross or reconnaissance plane. Down the dark road, in the distance, the lights of a town beckon and I follow.

The market, built around a central square, is alive even this late. People move back and forth. Night markets are a common feature of this war—there is no nighttime bombing or strafing. I stop by a telephone booth, gleaming white and chrome. It is growing out of a pile of baskets that houses angry chickens. There is no receiver and it most likely hasn’t worked since the war started. An interloper, it is regarded suspiciously by the sheep grazing on the rubbish spewed by the market: tin cans, paper, cellophane, fruit peels, rotten yams. The road across the market is a dirt track, mined with potholes. As I make my way through the throng of people shopping, or looking to steal, scents chase after me: goats, chickens, open sewers, muddy earth, dry thatch, rotting fruit, and vegetables.

I leave the market, crossing a small bridge humping a tired stream. Under a mango tree, in the deeper shadows, cows drink from the belly of a canoe sailing on a pile of sand. Everywhere, madmen and mendicants call. Children: bulbous heads pendulous over hunger-distended bellies with eyes washed out like the earth here. I stop in front of a flaking, dusty building. Somewhere inside, a generator hacks in coughy spurts and the lights flicker in sympathy. A worn sign announces:
Die Hard Motel and Eatery.
I make to enter, but lying across the threshold, dry, brown, dead, and molting, is a lizard. I hesitate. Lizards are sometimes seen as symbols of rebirth, but every rebirth requires a death. I hover on the porch and an old man hunched in the corner sees the lizard and me, and smiling says: “Faith is not a gift. It is earned.”

I don’t know what he means, so I ignore him.

He spits into the night: “Tufia! Even the dead ignore me!”

Shellshock
, I think, and return my attention to the interior of the bar. Several rebel soldiers, officers, I think, are eating at a table near the door, although they seem to be doing more drinking than eating right now. I stare at the plates of rice and stewed meat on the table and feel my stomach knot and my mouth water. Judging by the number of bottles strewn about the place, the men are drunk. One of them is telling a joke so loudly I can hear it out here.

“There are three construction workers, one of them is Igbo, one is Yoruba, and the other Hausa …” At this he spits.

“Enemy!” one soldier slurs, interrupting.

“Shut up, I’m talking! Anyway, the Igbo man opens his lunch pack and says, ‘Oh no! Not rice again. If I get one more rice dinner, I will throw myself off this scaffolding.’ The same is repeated by the Yoruba and Hausa man, except that the food in question is beans and okra respectively. The next day they all get together for lunch. The Igbo man sees his lunch. It is rice. He throws himself from the scaffolding and dies. The Yoruba man sees his is beans and throws himself after the Igbo man. The Hausa man soon follows.” The soldier pauses to take a drink from his glass, puts it down, and regardless of the fact that his comrades are half asleep, he continues. “At the inquest, the Igbo man’s wife says she had no idea he didn’t like rice and she would have changed his lunch if she knew. The Yoruba man’s wife says the same. The Hausa man’s wife is completely confused. ‘I don’t understand why he killed himself,’ she says. ‘For the past twenty years, Hassan has been making his own lunch.’”

Ever since the troubles, and the war, several racist jokes about the enemy have been circulating. This was one of the more famous ones. It is funny, but nonetheless I am tired of all this hate. The joke reminds me of my life in the north before the war.

The call to prayer cracked the skin of sleep. Starting softly, the muezzin’s voice trembled and then the chant grew robust. As the muezzin’s voice ruffled its feathers and strutted, the call rose to a single point. One note screaming in adoration of the most high. It trembled there in the sunshine for a few minutes before cutting off abruptly. There was a pause, a silence that itself was a call, a prayer. Then the muezzin’s voice began the call again. Softly, it built to a crescendo, then died again on that abrupt point, dropping the faithful into the pit of belief. Every morning the call came, rousing me. For the faithful it was joy, while the infidels fought it, struggling to wrap sleep tighter around the senses, but for me it was the voice of my father the imam. When the call ended, its last note a silent scream to Allah, the compound came awake.

It is a terrible thing in this divided nation, even in its infancy, for an Igbo man to be Muslim. I will never know why my father chose that path; one that put him outside his own community, his own people, most of whom are Catholic, and made him a thing that the people who would later become our enemies feared: a hybrid. Even though he had been a Muslim since he was fifteen and traveling as a singer with a band, and an imam for twenty, the only mosque they gave him was inside Sabon Gari: the foreigners’ ghetto. Everyone hated the mosque, sitting as it did by decree of the Saraduana in the midst of the Christian enclave. Everyone hated my father. Yet he was the one they came to for arbitration, for help, to borrow money, and to circumcise their sons. For a long time I hated my father too, but since he died, I have been trying to love him.

I look in at the soldiers and realize that somewhere along the line, somewhere in this war, I have lost my appetite for it. I want nothing more than to return to the safety of my platoon and to outlive this madness. I am tired. I sink onto the floor of the porch, not too far from the old man who spoke earlier, and I wonder if he just grew tired too. I light a cigarette, turning to offer one to the old man. He takes it greedily and lights up from the match I hold out to him. The price of coming this far has been too much. From my hiding space in the ceiling to this porch, there has been nothing but blood since the night my mother died. I didn’t come down for days after.

It was hot up there, the zinc roof heating up quickly in the sun, my hiding place soon becoming an oven, and I had to strip naked and sip continuously on the water my mother smuggled up. The roof was peppered with rust holes and the sun dripped through in rivers of hot oil, mixing the shouts of the marauding mobs outside, the scent of death, burning flesh, and the screams of the dying into a fire that burned me, patterning my psyche in polka dots of fear.

Finally, I unfurled my body from its cramped position. For the past two weeks there had been pogroms against the Igbos, a frenzy of murder and looting, and the streets were littered with so many bodies. Anyone who had even the slightest resemblance to the Bantu Igbo was killed. The litmus test for those in the shadowlands between was the ability to recite obscure sura from the Koran, or the taking of a life identified as Igbo. The night I left, I stood in the backyard of the tenement, which was enclosed by the U-shaped building. One wing housed the kitchens and bathrooms, the other L the two-room flats that housed the eight families.

Before the troubles, the yard echoed with life: children playing in giggling starts, mothers shouting gossip at each other, men sitting on benches playing checkers and drinking beer, music spilling out of rooms mixing with smells from the kitchens, giving the courtyard extra spice. I remembered the games of cricket, and Paul, who could bowl so fast his main job in the rebel army, if he is still alive, must be lobbing grenades instead of curve balls.