Song for Night (9 page)
Endlessly we play, never looking at each other but smiling into the distance, hearts racing with the anticipation.
Then a steady hand, palm flat.
Silence.
Still we smile as we scan for the danger, our hearts beating:
One. One. Two.
Two. Two. Two.
Three. Three. Three.
About a click outside of town, to my right, a steep bank of hills rises in green drama. Stunted trees struggle to hold onto the sheer faces. Creatures, maybe mountain goats, romp fearlessly at near ninety-degree angles. To my left the earth disappears into a deep ravine. Looking over the edge, I can make out a body of water. There is a scent in the air, a mixture of coriander, jasmine, and nutmeg that I know well: the smell of the savanna. That means I am approaching the middle plains. Closer to my home.
Up ahead the road passes alongside a large field. Set back on the far side are bleachers. This must have been the town’s stadium. Red circles track the field like the grooves in a tree trunk. I pause and recall happier days before the war when I played soccer with friends in a league we made up. The cup was something fashioned from old wood, tin cans, and foil. Sharp thorns in the grass walls around the fields made it difficult as the balls were always bursting. The imam however approved of football and so I had a virtually endless supply of them. Of course, I would interrupt the games and take my ball home if too many goals were scored against me.
As I get closer, I see the sun has burned the field to a brown crisp. Here and there, patches of red earth spill through like giant puddles of blood. It is as though the very earth is peppered with sores. Scattered as far as I can see are corpses. Like a field of cut corn, cropped and lying in untidy rows, drying slowly in the sun. Further back, behind the bullet-holed stands, the trees straggle in an untidy shade.
A dark shadow, a cloud, hangs over the whole field. I stop and squint. The cloud is local and too dark for the sun to steal through. It is alive; moving; seething; humming. With a gasp I realize that it is a cloud of flies. The cloud heads toward me, then rears up, taking on a form, a huge black-winged angel. I rub my eyes. We’ve all heard stories about angels appearing over killing fields, but none so dark, so empty. The form dissipates as the flies spread over the dead like a loose cotton shift.
As I watch, I see phantom soldiers walking with bent heads, rifles across their backs. One soldier, perhaps sixteen, is shot in the stomach, a deep gash that spills his guts like sausages strung up in a butcher’s window. He falls and I run to him, but a hail of bullets pushes me back. As I turn away, I see the boy stagger up and collect his intestines in an untidy heap, cradled like a baby in his arms. He then takes off, running. Desperate zigzag steps that send him crashing into the ground repeatedly, but he gets up every time. The shooting stops and I realize that it is phantom fire, and it isn’t aimed at me. The ghosts are firing at each other—the rebels on one side and the federal troops on the other. But then everybody stops shooting and watches the boy; even the enemy. Twenty feet on, he just stops and sags, hitting the ground in a gentle droop. The backs of his legs are stained by his fear, but he still cradles his guts in his arms. He dies, mouth open. There is nothing heroic about it. This confuses me; can a ghost die? My jaw drops as another soldier looks up at me, eyes misty, transparent, mouth open in a smoke trail of speech. I shut my eyes tightly and shake my head. When I open them, the phantom soldier has gone. I scan the horizon; nothing. Then like mist, he coalesces again.
Suddenly a sword of lightning slices through the plumpness of the hot sky. Rain. I stand for a while but the hot rain is like molten lead and I flee for the line of trees behind the stadium, taking cover under one. I shiver in the new cold, debating whether the apparitions I have seen are real. In this place everything is possible. Here we believe that when a person dies in a sudden and hard way, their spirit wanders confused looking for its body. Confused because they don’t realize they are dead. I know this. Traditionally a shaman would ease such a spirit across to the other world. Now, well, the land is crowded with confused spirits and all the shamans are soldiers.
I try to imagine what the imam would have thought about all this if he had lived. I realize that nothing I know of the world came from my Catholic mother or my Muslim father. All I know comes from the stories Grandfather told me. I feel a sudden rush of rage for father. What was it about Islam and the prophet and that way of life that made him give up so much for it? He moved north, into the heart of the place that destroyed us. What became of all those days and nights he spent in fasting and prayer, rocking back and forth in the dark and silent mosque that no one in the Sabon Gari stepped foot in? What became of all those lessons he taught me about the Koran and Islam? The five tenents?
All Muslims must embrace no God but Allah and no prophet above Mohammed, blessings be upon his name; all Muslims must at least once in their lives perform the pilgrimage, the Holy Hajj, to Mecca; all Muslims must pray five times a day, facing Mecca; all Muslims must give alms to the poor;
finally,
all Muslims must observe the Holy Fast of Ramadan
. Why didn’t it say,
All Muslims must never take another life, particularly one of their own, particularly an imam—just because his wife is a Catholic and his son, undecided?
That’s what the Igbo press said, that was the word on the streets in the Sabon Gari:
Local imam murdered by other Muslims because he married a Catholic
. Opus Dei, thousands of members strong, took to the streets, singing in Latin, the Gregorian chant rising and falling like a raven with clipped wings, a wonder to behold but unable to fly. But the provocation didn’t work; the streets weren’t filled with rioting Maitasine fundamentalists. A few hours of marching depressively in the sun, and Opus Dei disbanded. Of course, when the real pogroms started they didn’t regroup to fight, they fled. These were the people who murdered my father, people from Sabon Gari. People he’d probably lent money to. People who hated him as much as I do because in the end, I know now, we always hate the saintly, the kind. Not because they are kind, no, God knows we need that, but because their kindness makes us recognize the shits that we are. I fumble to light a cigarette. Beyond the shelter of the tree, the sky is an endless ocean and I feel like I am going to drown.
The old man I see approaching is like a lifeboat, pulling me back from that endless despair of sky. In his late sixties, small and wizened with the smile of a cherub, he is wearing a strange necklace of small bones with intricate markings. As he walks toward me, I see he is holding a sheaf of smoldering green herbs. The smoke from the bundle, thick and choking, wraps itself around the phantom soldiers, and as the smoke clears, the ghosts begin to disappear. He stops in front of me, head inclined. He is careful to keep the smoke away from me. He looks me over and introduces himself as Peter, the catechist of the church in the next town.
“But you look like a native priest,” I say, though I must have thought it because we have no signs for these words.
He smiles: “The conflict is never in the truth, only in how we receive it.”
“You are helping these souls.”
He nods. “These spirits here are lucky. At least they are close to their bodies. Sometimes an explosion blows the spirit miles away from its body. Imagine how confusing that is.”
The rain has eased to a hazy drizzle that wraps everything in a misty stole. Peter is standing about six feet away. I step toward him, the cigarette I hold out in offering between us. He steps back. His expression doesn’t change but something about him tenses. I stop. Does he think I am a federal soldier? Don’t I look Igbo?
“I am not the enemy, you know,” I say, but my hands don’t move. We do have a sign for this kind of communication, mind to mind—telepathy is no stranger to us. A hand held like a pistol, forefinger as barrel and thumb as hammer, barrel swinging away from the forehead and swinging back.
He nods and squats. “We’ll see about that,” he says, drawing a sign in the dirt. “If you are a ghost, if you are dead, you cannot step over this sign.” It is an invitation, a command almost. I smile and think this is just mumbo jumbo, but as hard as I try, I can’t move. I don’t know what to make of it. Just the power of suggestion, I say to myself, that’s what all faith is, right? I realize that in my head I am talking to the imam.
Peter steps back and draws another sign, erasing the first with his foot.
“If you are a demon or mean me harm, you cannot cross this one,” he says.
I step across it easily. He smiles and takes the cigarette from me. He says come and I follow, and although I feel his warmth like arms around me, he doesn’t touch me.
I stumble noisily after Peter who is moving with the grace and agility of a man half his age. I see the river rip out in front of me like a sudden sigh. I stop short. Peter comes back and pulls me along to the bank.
“I cannot go any further, I just need to close my eyes for a minute,” I say, collapsing on the grass. “I am trying to find my comrades, my platoon. I am not a deserter, not a coward.”
“I know,” he replies. “Your friends are not far.”
“You saw them?”
“They passed before you came onto the battlefield,” he says, but there is something in his tone that makes me suspicious.
“Why is this river called the Cross?” I ask, since I can’t put my finger on what is bothering me.
“Because we all have to cross it someday,” he replies.
I shake my head. Why can’t old people ever answer a question without using a riddle? I lie back on the bank. It feels like I have just closed my eyes when he is talking to me again.
“Wake up, young one,” he says. “You can’t stay here.”
“You’re right,” I say. “I need to find my platoon. I am their leader, you know.”
He smiles. “You look like a young general.”
“Major,” I correct, rubbing my eyes and coming up on one elbow. It is dark and I stare up at the stars pearling across the sky. I have lost all sense of time and don’t remember night coming upon us. It seems like just a moment ago I was standing in broad daylight in a field of dead men.
“Your journey is almost over,” he says gently. “You will need a boat.”
I sit up and watch him push a canoe into the river. Everything comes back to this river, I think. Maybe Grandfather was right, there is no escaping its flow. As I approach the water, my hair stands on end and I hesitate. I can’t do it. I can’t row through the dead again. Not in the dark.
“Come on,” he says again. Then reading my mind again, he adds: “You have all the light you need inside you.”
It sounds like something Grandfather would have said. I don’t believe him, but having no other choice I get in gingerly and push off, scything the water with the oars. I travel silently, disturbed only by the swish of the paddle. After a while, I pull the oars in, wrap my arms around myself, and settle back down to sleep.
I am still drifting downriver when I wake up. It is daylight. Stiff and sore, I look around. The thick forest has given way to large plains bordering each side. I wish I had some coffee; strong, sweet, and black. I gather phlegm and spit into the water.
The plains are man-made. Stumps point rudely where trees have been cut back. In some places, whole ghost forests hug the banks, trees half cut, dry, silver, and twisted. It has a tortured beauty. Before the war, the government gave grants to farmers on the plains to encourage and develop sheep farming. The amount of the grant was determined by the number of sheep each farmer had. People began to inflate the numbers of their sheep. To justify it, they began to annex part of the forest, cutting the trees back to develop more grazing land. But then the government twigged something was wrong and began to conduct inspections. To beat the inspectors, the farmers borrowed each other’s sheep and drove them from field to field, always one step ahead of the inspectors. Pretty ingenious, I think; if it weren’t so tragic. Now that the few hundred sheep have been eaten, all that’s left is this barren forest, and a few abandoned structures, built like American ranches. I spit again. This was never really about farming at all. It was about a lifestyle. If peace ever comes, I hope it makes us wiser.
The rest of the trip passes in mental silence. A few hours later, I bring the canoe to a halt with a bump. I am back at the edge of the forest.
This fucking river and this fucking forest, I think.
I need to get home.
Right there on the bank, on the edge of the river, is an old fishing village. The houses are empty, roofs fallen in from neglect or from bombs, I can’t tell which, but it’s all the same, everything here is caused by the war. I sigh and pull the boat ashore, and hide it under some raffia from a fallen roof. I wonder who used to live here. So far, most of my stops have coincided with something that happened before. But I don’t remember this village, or why I have been brought here.
There is a small lime tree, no bigger than a bush, right by the river. It is part of a row of stunted lime trees no doubt planted by the fishermen, the fruit used to clean and cure all manner of seafood. Plucking some, I crouch and throw one at a pot I see sitting on a cold hearth outside a hut. The pot falls over with a startled lid clatter, spilling rice which marches in an uneven column like termites. This excites some chickens scratching close to the forest edge. They dash over and peck merrily at the rice. The explosion I am expecting doesn’t come. Next I lob another green grenade at a spilt basket. There is the crunch of a melon exposing its red innards. No explosion, which means no booby-traps. I stand up and walk toward the village. I am not worried about mines. If there were any, the animals would have either all died or left the village.
Methodically I begin to ransack the huts, looking for anything of value. Somewhere along the way I lost the bag of food I took from the stash in the forest clearing. The odd thing is, I don’t remember when or how, and it is curious that I haven’t come across another stash, but even odder is that I don’t seem to care. Even as I work, I am disturbed by this invasion of other people’s lives. In the sand by my feet are some black-and-white photographs of a family. I bend and pick one up. The mother, stern and well made up, stares stonily at the camera. The father has a sheepish grin. There is a baby, mouth open in a happy gurgle. Embarrassed, I drop it.
