“Why should a man, a decent man, throw away his life. For nothing! Charley didn’t need to die. Not for this stinking place. Yes, everything stinks here. Even these girls who come here all dolled up and smiling, what are they worth? Don’t I know? A head of stockfish, that’s all, or one American dollar and they are ready to tumble into bed.”
In the threatening silence following the explosion one of the young officers walked up to him and gave him three thundering slaps—right! left! right!—pulled him up from his seat and (there were things like tears in his eyes) shoved him outside. His friend, who had tried in vain to shut him up, followed him out and the silenced party heard them drive off. The officer who did the job returned dusting his palms.
“Fucking beast!” said he with an impressive coolness. And all the girls showed with their eyes that they rated him a man and a hero.
“Do you know him?” Gladys asked Nwankwo.
He didn’t answer her. Instead he spoke generally to the party.
“The fellow was clearly drunk,” he said.
“I don’t care,” said the officer. “It is when a man is drunk that he speaks what is on his mind.”
“So you beat him for what was on his mind,” said the host, “that is the spirit, Joe.”
“Thank you, sir,” said Joe, saluting.
“His name is Joe,” Gladys and the girl on her left said in unison, turning to each other.
At the same time Nwankwo and a friend on the other side of him were saying quietly, very quietly, that although the man had been rude and offensive what he had said about the girls was unfortunately the bitter truth, only he was the wrong man to say it.
When the dancing resumed Captain Joe came to Gladys for a dance. She sprang to her feet even before the word was out of his mouth. Then she remembered immediately and turned round to take permission from Nwankwo. At the same time the Captain also turned to him and said, “Excuse me.”
“Go ahead,” said Nwankwo, looking somewhere between the two.
It was a long dance and he followed them with his eyes without appearing to do so. Occasionally a relief plane passed overhead and somebody immediately switched off the lights saying it might be the Intruder. But it was only an excuse to dance in the dark and make the girls giggle, for the sound of the Intruder was well known.
Gladys came back feeling very self-conscious and asked Nwankwo to dance with her. But he wouldn’t. “Don’t bother about me,” he said, “I am enjoying myself perfectly sitting here and watching those of you who dance.”
“Then let’s go,” she said, “if you won’t dance.”
“But I never dance, believe me. So please, enjoy yourself.”
She danced next with the Lieutenant-Colonel and again with Captain Joe, and then Nwankwo agreed to take her home.
“I am sorry I didn’t dance,” he said as they drove away. “But I swore never to dance as long as this war lasts.”
She said nothing.
“When I think of somebody like that pilot who got killed last night. And he had no hand whatever in the quarrel. All his concern was to bring us food …”
“I hope that his friend is not like him,” said Gladys.
“The man was just upset by his friend’s death. But what I am saying is that with people like that getting killed and our own boys suffering and dying at the war fronts I don’t see why we should sit around throwing parties and dancing.”
“You took me there,” said she in final revolt. “They are your friends. I don’t know them before.”
“Look, my dear, I am not blaming you. I am merely telling you why I personally refuse to dance. Anyway, let’s change the subject … Do you still say you want to go back tomorrow? My driver can take you early enough on Monday morning for you to go to work. No? All right, just as you wish. You are the boss.”
She gave him a shock by the readiness with which she followed him to bed and by her language.
“You want to shell?” she asked. And without waiting for an answer said, “Go ahead but don’t pour in troops!”
He didn’t want to pour in troops either and so it was all right. But she wanted visual assurance and so he showed her.
One of the ingenious economics taught by the war was that a rubber condom could be used over and over again. All you had to do was wash it out, dry it and shake a lot of talcum powder over it to prevent its sticking; and it was as good as new. It had to be the real British thing, though, not some of the cheap stuff they brought in from Lisbon which was about as strong as a dry cocoyam leaf in the harmattan.
He had his pleasure but wrote the girl off. He might just as well have slept with a prostitute, he thought. It was clear as daylight to him now that she was kept by some army officer. What a terrible transformation in the short period of less than two years! Wasn’t it a miracle that she still had memories of the other life, that she even remembered her name? If the affair of the drunken Red Cross man should happen again now, he said to himself, he would stand up beside the fellow and tell the party that here was a man of truth. What a terrible fate to befall a whole generation! The mothers of tomorrow!
By morning he was feeling a little better and more generous in his judgments. Gladys, he thought, was just a mirror reflecting a society that had gone completely rotten and maggoty at the centre. The mirror itself was intact; a lot of smudge but no more. All that was needed was a clean duster. “I have a duty to her,” he told himself, “the little girl that once revealed to me our situation. Now she is in danger, under some terrible influence.”
He wanted to get to the bottom of this deadly influence. It was clearly not just her good-time girlfriend, Augusta, or whatever her name was. There must be some man at the centre of it, perhaps one of these heartless attack-traders who traffic in foreign currencies and make their hundreds of thousands by sending young men to hazard their lives bartering looted goods for cigarettes behind enemy lines, or one of those contractors who receive piles of money daily for food they never deliver to the army. Or perhaps some vulgar and cowardly army officer full of filthy barrack talk and fictitious stories of heroism. He decided he had to find out. Last night he had thought of sending his driver alone to take her home. But no, he must go and see for himself where she lived. Something was bound to reveal itself there. Something on which he could anchor his saving operation. As he prepared for the trip his feeling towards her softened with every passing minute. He assembled for her half of the food he had received at the relief centre the day before. Difficult as things were, he thought a girl who had something to eat would be spared, not all, but some of the temptation. He would arrange with his friend at the WCC to deliver something to her every fortnight.
Tears came to Gladys’s eyes when she saw the gifts. Nwankwo didn’t have too much cash on him but he got together twenty pounds and handed it over to her.
“I don’t have foreign exchange, and I know this won’t go far at all, but …”
She just came and threw herself at him, sobbing. He kissed her lips and eyes and mumbled something about victims of circumstance, which went over her head. In deference to him, he thought with exultation, she had put away her high-tinted wig in her bag.
“I want you to promise me something,” he said.
“What?”
“Never use that expression about shelling again.”
She smiled with tears in her eyes. “You don’t like it? That’s what all the girls call it.”
“Well, you are different from all the girls. Will you promise?”
“O.K.”
Naturally their departure had become a little delayed. And when they got into the car it refused to start. After poking around the engine the driver decided that the battery was flat. Nwankwo was aghast. He had that very week paid thirty-four pounds to change two of the cells and the mechanic who performed it had promised him six months’ service. A new battery, which was then running at two hundred and fifty pounds was simply out of the question. The driver must have been careless with someth
ing, he thought.
“It must be because of last night,” said the driver.
“What happened last night?” asked Nwankwo sharply, wondering what insolence was on the way. But none was intended.
“Because we use the headlight.”
“Am I supposed not to use my light then? Go and get some people and try pushing it.” He got out again with Gladys and returned to the house while the driver went over to neighbouring houses to seek the help of other servants.
After at least half an hour of pushing it up and down the street, and a lot of noisy advice from the pushers, the car finally spluttered to life shooting out enormous clouds of black smoke from the exhaust.
It was eight-thirty by his watch when they set out. A few miles away a disabled soldier waved for a lift.
“Stop!” screamed Nwankwo. The driver jammed his foot on the brakes and then turned his head towards his master in bewilderment.
“Don’t you see the soldier waving? Reverse and pick him up!”
“Sorry, sir,” said the driver. “I don’t know Master wan to pick him.”
“If you don’t know you should ask. Reverse back.”
The soldier, a mere boy, in filthy khaki drenched in sweat lacked his right leg from the knee down. He seemed not only grateful that a car should stop for him but greatly surprised. He first handed in his crude wooden crutches which the driver arranged between the two front seats, then painfully he levered himself in.
“Thank sir,” he said turning his neck to look at the back and completely out of breath.
“I am very grateful. Madame, thank you.”
“The pleasure is ours,” said Nwankwo. “Where did you get your wound?”
“At Azumini, sir. On the tenth of January.”
“Never mind. Everything will be all right. We are proud of you boys and will make sure you receive your due reward when it is all over.”
“I pray God, sir.”
They drove on in silence for the next half-hour or so. Then as the car sped down a slope towards a bridge somebody screamed—perhaps the driver, perhaps the soldier—“They have come!” The screech of the brakes merged into the scream and the shattering of the sky overhead. The doors flew open even before the car had come to a stop and they were fleeing blindly to the bush. Gladys was a little ahead of Nwankwo when they heard through the drowning tumult the soldier’s voice crying: “Please come and open for me!” Vaguely he saw Gladys stop; he pushed past her shouting to her at the same time to come on. Then a high whistle descended like a spear through the chaos and exploded in a vast noise and motion that smashed up everything. A tree he had embraced flung him away through the bush. Then another terrible whistle starting high up and ending again in a monumental crash of the world; and then another, and Nwankwo heard no more.
He woke up to human noises and weeping and the smell and smoke of a charred world. He dragged himself up and staggered towards the source of the sounds.
From afar he saw his driver running towards him in tears and blood. He saw the remains of his car smoking and the entangled remains of the girl and the soldier. And he let out a piercing cry and fell down again.
About the Author
CHINUA ACHEBE was born in Nigeria in 1930. He was raised in the large village of Ogidi, one of the first centers of Anglican missionary work in Eastern Nigeria, and is a graduate of University College, Ibadan.
Characterized by the New York Times Magazine as “one of Nigeria’s most gifted writers,” Chinua Achebe has published novels, short stories, essays, and children’s books. His volume of poetry, Christmas in Biafra, written during the Biafran War, was the joint winner of the first Commonwealth Poetry Prize. Of his novels, Arrow of God is winner of the New Statesman–Jock Campbell Award, and Anthills of the Savannah was a finalist for the 1987 Booker Prize in England.
Mr. Achebe has received numerous honors from around the world, including the Honorary Fellowship of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, as well as twelve honorary doctorates from universities in England, Scotland, the United States, Canada, and Nigeria. He is also the recipient of Nigeria’s highest award for intellectual achievement, the Nigerian National Merit Award. In 2007, he won the Man Booker International Prize for Fiction.
Mr. Achebe lives with his wife in Annandale, New York, where they both teach at Bard College. They have four children.
Girls at War Page 10