by Ishmael Beah
“Yes, where was I?” he called out, to no one in particular. “Oh, I just arrived on that ship out there.” He pointed to one of the container ships anchored at a distance.
“But how did I get here? Maybe I walked. But my feet and my clothes are dry! Strange, how strange.” He tapped the bottoms of his feet with his staff, then put it back under his arm while he continued his discussion with himself.
“Would you go tomorrow to celebrate a day of independence assigned to you by others?” he asked. “No, I the Messiah wouldn’t. You should take your shadows somewhere else tomorrow. Somewhere they can be useful.”
Namsa left her spot on the log and ran to him.
He looked down at her in surprise. “Did they send you?” He peered at her more closely, and a look of recognition came over his face. “Oh, you are my shipmate! Forgive me. Sometimes I am not myself.”
He took up his path along the beach, carrying on with his discussion.
“Don’t let the world ruin you, young child. You do not need a day of independence. You are free every day. Where are my shipmates?” he called, and then he began to sing. “Don’t, don’t, row your boat, life’s no longer a dream . . .” He skipped ahead as he sang, tossing the papers into the air and then running to gather them with urgency.
Namsa picked up one of the leaflets and brought it back to Khoudi, who read it aloud.
COME UN-COLONIZE YOUR EARS TOMORROW
SHADRACH THE MESSIAH’S NON-INDEPENDENCE DAY REFLECTIONS AT BEACH KIOSK
Time: midday-night
Cost: free, as freedom should be
“Can we come tomorrow?” Namsa asked, as soon as Khoudi finished reading.
“Maybe for a bit,” Khoudi said. “I have something to do tomorrow.” She took off her hat and let her hair free.
Namsa looked at her closely. “This is where you come when you go away by yourself, isn’t it?” She found Khoudi’s gaze. “I won’t tell anyone.”
Khoudi smiled. “Thank you for keeping my secret.” It wasn’t exactly that she was hiding from her family when she came here, she told herself. Besides, she had other places that she hadn’t told Namsa about yet. At times she just had this urge that came from somewhere deep inside her, to be alone, to understand herself alone, to see how others reacted to her, people who didn’t know her. But Namsa was too young to understand.
Khoudi’s attention wandered back to the group of girls. Now they were sitting at a nearby café, at a table filled with food and drinks, laughing and talking. Namsa had started playing with her hair, and the distraction of her presence kept Khoudi from fully imagining herself among the group. But it gave her an idea: She would go get her hair done the following day. And for the moment, to occupy Namsa, she instructed her to arrange her hair into two big braids that she could fit properly under her beanie. Delighted, Namsa proceeded to make a beautiful mess of her hair, and Khoudi took pleasure in being fussed over.
They walked on the beach for as long as they could. Then they sat on the pavement, shook the sand from their feet, and put their shoes back on—flip-flops for Namsa, old sneakers for Khoudi, the soles held together by rope and burnt rubber. The image of herself among the smiling, chattering young women made the coarseness of the canvas bearable to her. The two girls made their way along the line of dilapidated Toyotas puffing dark smoke from their dying engines. The cars themselves were another instance of the patchwork that was Freedom Town, Khoudi thought, a patchwork made up partly of reminders of just where you were in society and partly of flashes of what you could not attain but nevertheless longed for, and couldn’t help dreaming of.
* * *
—
King’s property, king’s property, everything is correct.
Namsa tried whistling, but it wasn’t loud enough, so Khoudi redid it. Three whistling answers came in on the wind, and the girls jumped over the fallen palm tree and through the low guava trees that hadn’t yet borne fruit that season. Encounter One was the ruins of an abandoned chalet. It was completely devoured by vines on every side, so that you might pass without noticing it.
The boys were already there.
Elimane was sitting on the stoop, rolling the tip of his pen against the concrete part of the wall and massaging it between his palms to wake the sleeping ink that refused to come out and write.
Kpindi and Ndevui looked up briefly to acknowledge the girls’ arrival, then continued with the game of marbles they were playing on the floor. They had made up the game themselves, using the cracks and holes in the concrete. You got points for rolling a marble into a designated hole in the floor, and if your opponent’s marble was blocking your path, you knocked it as far as you could with your own. As usual, Kpindi was irritating Ndevui by flicking the marbles in a way that Ndevui said was against the rules. “That is fallahand,” he kept saying, explaining to Kpindi that it was cheating to let his hand hang over the line while throwing his marble.
“They are not going to ask how we escaped and where we have been?” Namsa whispered to Khoudi.
“Why are you whispering?” Khoudi asked.
“They seem not to want to be disturbed,” Namsa whispered.
“We do not talk about things that happen so frequently,” Khoudi answered, in a normal voice. “It is pointless. It is similar to breathing. You do not walk around and say, ‘Oh, I am breathing now, and I am breathing again.’ You know you are breathing, and that is that, and if you were not, you would know.”
She took Namsa by the hand and found a place among the shiny old wooden columns for them to sit.
“I’ve got four and you’ve got two,” Kpindi called out. “So we are doing best of ten, and when I win, you give me your ganja.” He pointed to the rolled blunt behind Ndevui’s ear.
“You know we don’t gamble for ganja,” Ndevui answered. “That we share.”
“Okay, okay,” Kpindi answered. He threw his marble, and it knocked Ndevui’s out of the way.
Elimane had attempted to return to his reading and note-taking, but his pen was still balky. He threw it on the ground, his eyes on where it landed.
The wind brought reminders of the ongoing commotion from beyond—the sounds of people fleeing, or chasing. The sounds drowned out the usual sounds of evening—the chirping of birds, the waves hitting the shores, something being pounded in a mortar, sirens, and a call for prayer. The ears of nature seemed to be listening, waiting for something to snap. Gradually the footfalls of survival and calamity passed, and faded into the distance. The day was drawing to an end.
“I have an idea for a new sign language we might use,” said Elimane. “It is from this book. The context is that—”
“Close your bloody mouth that goes on when not needed, man!” snapped Ndevui. “Sometimes I just need to stop hearing you.” It was rare for him to go off like that, but Elimane had distracted him just as he was about to make what he was sure would be a winning throw.
A silence fell on them. Then Elimane spoke. “Young brother, there is no need for the unnecessary anger. Smoke your ganja and cool down.”
Ndevui offered his hand to Elimane, who took it, breaking the tension. They all had such moments, and knew how to let them pass, and they sat for a while in peace as darkness fell.
They had just started back to the plane together when a phone rang, startling them. They stood there for a moment; then Elimane tapped his pockets, searching. “That’s coming from me. I completely forgot.” He took out the phone and answered it. “Hello, hello, hello.” He moved to different spots in the ruins, searching for a stronger signal.
He listened carefully. “I worry that the red caps are still chasing people around there. They will catch anyone they come across.” He listened. “You think they are gone now, and the ferry area is clear? How do you know that?”
When he hung up, he told the others all that had transpired with William Handkerchief. When h
e got to the part about the phone, he looked up at Namsa and smiled. “That was excellent today.” He explained to the others what she had done, and they all praised her.
“How did you get the phone?” Kpindi asked.
“I have my ways.” Namsa kept it a mystery, and they didn’t press her, as they could guess.
“Don’t get comfortable, though,” Elimane admonished her. “Challenge yourself to get better and better at it.”
Now, he explained, William Handkerchief was calling with an assignment, as Elimane had hoped. The man who usually offloaded his goods for him had been among those arrested, and William Handkerchief needed his “commodities,” as he called them, and fast. If Elimane could deliver them in the next few hours, he’d offer one hundred thousand, the equivalent of ten US dollars, per bag. That was quite a sum of money! It could provide not only regular food for a while, but clothes and books and more. And who knew what other assignments might come?
“Does he know about us?” Namsa asked hesitantly.
“No,” said Elimane. “He said it is something one person can do, but I think that with all that is going on, it is better to go together.”
“We should be out there anyway, trying to get what we can from this madness.” Ndevui waited for Elimane to lead them on.
“How did you come up with ‘William Handkerchief’?” Kpindi asked, just before they reached the road and resumed their custom of spreading out and comporting themselves as if they were not traveling together.
Elimane explained about the handkerchiefs. “And William? That’s after Shakespeare, who you know is a favorite of mine.”
This made the others giggle, in one last expression of family feeling before they took the road again.
The road was not as crowded as it had been in the morning, and here and there it was strewn with shoes and clothing that had evidently been dropped by people fleeing. Like the little family’s own belongings, these scattered items, worn beyond use, weren’t the kinds of things you wanted to pick up. In the distance, a faint voice from a megaphone announced, If you see anything, please bring it to the nearest checkpoint or police station. You will be doing your nation a great service, and you will be rewarded. That made the five of them giggle again, to themselves.
As they approached the ferry landing, things grew even quieter. Even the lit interiors of the mostly single-story concrete houses seemed without motion as the group passed the last verandas of Foloiya and covered the short distance to the wharf. The landing now had a ghastly loneliness.
They huddled together behind one of the market stalls. There was no one to see them, so at least they did not have to pretend not to know one another, which was a relief.
“Namsa, you go ahead,” Elimane whispered. The reason was obvious to all of them: Should anyone be lurking, her presence would be the least threatening. If someone emerged, she would pretend to be scared and run away, and they could create a commotion to distract her pursuers and protect her. It was just one more in a series of risks and defenses, hundreds of which they calculated every day.
Newly confident and happy to prove herself, Namsa went skipping down the road to the jetty. “Is anyone there?” she called out. “My uncle sent me to see when the ferry would be leaving tomorrow.” No one answered. She threw stones at the iron body of the boat, which was shaking with the incoming tide. She whistled, King’s property, king’s property, everything is correct. King’s property, king’s property, everything is correct.
Elimane, Khoudi, and Ndevui covered the distance from the market stalls to the ferry as quickly as possible, leaving Kpindi as a lookout for anyone coming from inland. They ran past Namsa, who remained where she was as a secondary lookout, and to distract anyone else who might approach the ferry.
Inside, Elimane diligently followed William Handkerchief’s instructions. Under the life rings and vests that the crew had long ceased passing out to passengers, as they never wore them, he located the bags he’d been told to look for. They were of waterproof material and so big that an adult could fit inside, sitting down, but were not as heavy as they looked, partly because they weren’t full. What could be inside them? Elimane pressed them, wondering, but stopped when Khoudi and Ndevui gave him a cautioning look.
They cinched the bags with the ropes they’d found in the side pockets, as William Handkerchief had mentioned, compressing them to about half their original size. Elimane went to the side of the ferry to make sure all was clear. Then he, Ndevui, and Khoudi each picked up a bag and jumped onto the landing with it. They ran past Namsa, to the market stalls. As soon as they reached Kpindi, Namsa ran to join them. Huddling together, they whispered about how they were going to walk to the delivery point, a bakery just at the entrance to town. Carrying the bags together on the open road seemed too risky. They came up with as much of a plan as they could muster.
Namsa would walk ahead, followed by Elimane, wearing one of the bags like a backpack, his arms through the straps. Behind Elimane, at some distance, would come Kpindi, not carrying anything, then Khoudi with the second bag, and finally, at another distance, Ndevui with the last bag. Once Namsa reached the point of delivery, she was to turn around and walk back to position herself between Khoudi and Ndevui. The hope was that the gaps between them, and the interspersing of those with bags and those without, would avoid rousing suspicion or even memory, should they pass anyone.
Before they could set out, they heard a car approaching. They ran behind the more remote stalls, pressing their backs against some empty oil drums. The vehicle slowed down, and they heard a radio check and then military-sounding footsteps. They heard someone make the rounds of the area and then return to the vehicle, which departed into the silence of the evening.
When the rear lights of the vehicle had disappeared, they began to walk. Namsa went briskly through the lightless, uneven street. After about five minutes, she spotted a man up on a veranda. He was wearing a white gown, and she imagined that he had come out to get some of the cool breeze that had started pushing the humid evening air away. Moving into the shadows, she whistled, Lazarus, Lazarus. She knew the others would take shelter, with feathered steps. She remembered that Elimane had chosen this signal because of something about the rising of Lazarus from the dead. She couldn’t remember the story exactly, but she knew that they were supposed to use it whenever they encountered someone up and about unexpectedly. The man startled at the whistle and glanced about. Then, unable to see where it was coming from and looking uneasy, he went back inside. Namsa waited until everything seemed to be quiet within, then signaled the all clear, and the little caravan carried on.
After about thirty minutes, which felt much longer in the eeriness of the quiet road, imaginary threats behind every tree, they made it to the bakery. The others waited some distance away, lurking in the dark, while Elimane carried the bags the last stretch.
The baker was waiting in the darkened doorway of the shop. As soon as he saw Elimane and the bags, he took him inside. A kerosene lamp hung in the corner, covered so that it cast its brightness on only a small space. He indicated that Elimane should leave. Elimane insisted on calling William Handkerchief, who didn’t pick up, but rang back shortly after Elimane hung up. He told Elimane that he could leave the bags with the baker and said that the baker had his pay. He asked to speak to the baker, and when they hung up, Elimane collected the money, and the baker told him that William Handkerchief was impressed and was going to call him for another job soon enough. In the meantime, William Handkerchief wanted to meet with Elimane in person again within the next few days.
Elimane didn’t say much, but he nodded his agreement. Then he left the baker and returned to the others. He showed them the money before putting it in his pocket.
The search for what the day held for them was over. Out of habit, however, they walked home without acknowledging one another, passing here and there others who hoped that the day would yet yi
eld up some generosity before it departed.
A few people were coming outside again, now that danger had once again passed. They sat on their verandas and listened to their radios or checked the dull screens of their badly charged phones.
Elimane was the first to hear the report, which came from a portable radio that hung by its antenna from the branch of a guava tree, blasting music to whoever happened to pass by.
Breaking news. The military police conducted raids today in several locations, looking to retrieve sensitive documents that were earlier reported to be stolen from the government treasury. Anonymous sources indicate that the missing documents relate to government funds. Updates as we have them. Tune in tomorrow at our regular time for a discussion about digitalizing our banking and information systems.
The radio returned to music. Elimane broke formation. “Did you hear that? They have gone far this time!” The others hadn’t registered it. But soon they passed other radios that were also blaring out the news.
Khoudi burst out laughing. “Oh, wow, they really think we are all stupid!” she exclaimed, and slowly the rest of them began to laugh too.
“Well, you never know,” said Kpindi. “Elimane here knows everything, so it might make sense to him. At any rate, if we ever come across such a stash, he will know what to do.” That generated more laughter. Those who searched the day for something to eat were not interested in documents, sensitive or not.
* * *
—
It wasn’t yet the season of the harmattan, when the Sahara coughed the cold dry mist of sand that covered the skin like a ghostly garment, but an unusually cold wind came up as they neared home. One after another, shivering, they entered through the break in the foliage, Khoudiemata in the lead.
“Wait. Something is off.”
Khoudi stopped abruptly. Before them, in the red mud, were fresh footprints, of people who wore better shoes than they did, and the broken grasses betrayed that they had been recently trampled.