by Edna O'Brien
I was hazy when I stood up. Clots of blood dropped into the bucket.
We were made to witness as other girls were brought on. The table squeaked as the men became even more heated and jubilant.
When it was over we staggered back, sore, baffled. We couldn’t speak. We were too young to know what had happened, or what to call it. Fatim remembered that at her first school there was a doll that girls poked at and one girl took a scissors to the cloth gusset and said Dolly must have her operation. We had our operation. They had the first of us. It was dark now and stars were feasting in the heavens.
THE WOMAN LED ME ACROSS to the cookhouse. This was where I would work. It smelt of slaughter. Sides of bush meat hung from the trees outside, hosts of flies hovering and feeding on it. I had to cook for the entire unit. Commanders were to be given the largest portions, the lieutenants next and the recruits would make do with a kind of stew, small cuts of meat, with millet or sorghum added to it. When there was not enough meat I was brought strips of hide to roast. The sizzle of it, in that yard spitting out its fat and its juices made them wild with impatience. The three dogs that were locked up by day howled and hurled themselves against the galvanised door.
They had porridge in the morning, which they would eat from a trough on a big table. In the evenings, the elite would be served in their different quarters, and the lower ranks ate at that same big table. I must never serve them. Wives carry dishes from the cookhouse to the huts. If, by any chance, any one of the men should have to come into the cookhouse, I must avert my eyes.
John-John was the only boy I could meet, probably because he was so young. He was about ten or eleven. He rode a push bicycle, wore short pants and a blazer with brass buttons that were far too big for him. He rolled his sleeves up when he got down to work, and he sang. He sang with the voice of a girl. There were meats of every kind, birds and bats and lizards, the eyes of the birds staring at us, glassy, and the wild bats with their wide wings still spread out, as if even in death they remembered their night flights.
We hacked the haunches of meat and with different knives scraped the dead insects and maggots stuck to the skin. We stuffed the birds with leaves, to stifle the bad smells. He knew their names – turmeric, juniper, baobab.
I could never catch the words of John-John’s song but I guessed that it is a hymn. He cycled around to the various encampments, delivering the provisions, and lived in a sort of cave with four other boys. Later, he helped me carry the big pots to the fires that we had made in the yard. They swung on chains that were attached to wooden pivots and the rotten smell of boiling meat and boiling game filled the environs of that place. It got that I had the key to the store room and unbeknownst to the wives, I could filch a few things for John-John and me to eat. He loved potato skins more than anything else, especially with roasted onions. We ate outside, where the sentries rarely patrolled, because they were afraid of rats.
Oh my God
Oh my God
Oh my God
You deserve our praise
At last, I learnt how he came to be captured:
They are coming. They are coming. They surrounded our village and we were very afraid. My sister, my mother and me. There are lots of other ladies and girls, all crying, like us, and we flee for our lives. The Jihadis surrounded our village and so we had to run. My father was not with us. He was away at the farm and we did not know if they had caught him. We ran. The other ladies who were escaping with us did not want me because I was a boy and they knew it was boys the Jihadis wanted, to turn them into soldiers. Even running we are terrified that they will chase us deep into the forest. After we have run a long time and no more breath, we fall on top of one another. Everybody is crying. My mother begs a lady to give her a dress from her bundle, so that she can make me into a girl. The lady says no. It is her best dress. Mama begged and begged and finally other women plead, say it is a matter of saving a life, a child’s life. There is arguments. Then one woman pulls the dress from the bundle and she and the lady have a fight, big fight, until the dress is confiscated.
My mother takes me behind a tree, removes my short pants and then puts a blue headdress on me. They all look at me dressed as a girl and even though they are unhappy, the children can’t help laughing and making fun of me. Soon it is night and we lie down wherever we can and I sleep in the blue dress. It is cold in the night. We waken very early and my sister is gone. She is nowhere. My mother goes among the groups asking for a sign of my sister and when there is none she runs around screaming and calling. But the leader of our group says it is better that we move on, because by now the militants will have learned where we are and they will be coming to kill us. All the time my mother is shouting my sister’s name, ‘Umi, Umi, Umi,’ as if my sister will appear from nowhere. So against her will we all carry on and I can feel my mother’s grief come right through me, because she has backed me. She is barely able to hold me.
We arrive at a village and there is a thatched house where everyone has huddled to escape the sun. My mother lets me down and asks another lady to mind me, because she has to find her little girl, even if it be her dead body that she finds. I see her hurry back towards the mountain. So we wait there and some people give us yam from their farm. We eat it raw. Everyone is very quiet and very afraid and no one is talking, because we do not know what next. Different rumours are whispered. After a night and another day and almost another night, my mother returns with my sister on her back and as she lets her down, my sister is saying ‘Maam-ma,’ because she is still afraid from the time alone on the mountain. My mother is so tired from the search and then the trudge that she falls asleep while she is still talking. ‘Why did you run away?’ I am cross with my sister, because she took my mother from me. She says she doesn’t know why. Others were going up a hill and she followed, because she thought that we would be following behind. Then the group got scattered. Some were walking faster than others and she had to rest a little bit and then catch up with them along the mountain, so as to get across the border before day. My mother found her all alone and asleep, her clothes wet from the dew.
We stayed in the thatched house, where more lost people kept arriving. It was suffocating. Then my mother went in search of someone who had a motorbike. Before going, she undid the knot at the end of her wrapper, where she kept the little money she had saved. That money was earned from beans that we planted and sold at the market. She only took enough to pay for the motorcycle, because she knew he would want it all. She pinned the naira to the inside of my vest.
On that motor ride there were three of us, my sister, my mother and me, and we crossed underneath the mountain, where my sister nearly died. The bike was going zigzag zigzag and my sister was screaming and my mother held onto us for dear life. When we got down a slope and onto a plain, there were men loading food and water onto lorries. My mother knelt before them and pleaded for something to eat for the children. They could hear our stomachs rumbling. Her hope was to get us back to our own village, where there would be some people and maybe our father would be home by now. The men loading the lorry gave us a bottle of orange. We took turns with it. We drank very little, so as not to be greedy. The men said that the militants had moved on and so my mother decided to first go to our own farm and see if there was anything left of the harvest. Along the way, she put my sister with my grandmother, who had been hiding for weeks with cousins. The cousins did not want my sister. But hearing the sad story, her nearly dying on the mountain, they took pity and let her in. My mother and I went on to a place not far from our farm and she paid the motorcyclist and we walked up the crooked path to the top of the hill. Our crops had not been stolen, though other crops all around had been pillaged. So we picked all the beans and put them into bags that we had brought. Now we had something to sell. We headed back towards the village. A man stopped us on the path. At first we thought he was one of the Sect, but then he said a prayer that we knew, and we felt safe. He was a tall man with very keen eyes. ‘Are
those beans for sale?’ he asked. ‘Some are,’ my mother replied. ‘How much?’ ‘Five thousand naira,’ my mother said and I piped up and said, ‘Six thousand,’ and there, on a ridge of rocky land, we bargained and bargained, so that the price shot up and in the end it had gone from five thousand to seven thousand.
Once we had rested a few days with my grandmother and the cousins and shared some of the beans, my mother decided that we must find our father. We must be a family again. With the little money, she was full of hope, believing it would enable us to start to build a house. So we took to walking, Mama backing my sister, who was clinging to her and saying ‘Maama-ma’ in case she was lost again. In a village we enquired of a policeman who said my father was not dead. He had heard that my father had come back to his own house and was living in one end of it that had not been completely burnt.
My father could not believe it when we walked into our half-burnt kitchen. He was in his shirtsleeves. He holds us in a huddle, not sure if we are living or dead. He asks God if he is dreaming.
Then my mother and he sit on the floor and count all the money. They decide that in a few days, they will go back to the farm, to gather the rest of the crop. My sister was put in the church, where the pastor has taken people in, all crammed into one room and sleeping on the floor. My mother and father set out for the farm and I am alone. The idea was I would go to a neighbour in a nearby village. But I say to myself, if my parents have decided to stay all night up at the farm to guard their crops I will not go to a neighbour, I will guard our house. Then at evening time, it happens. Not on cycles. Just a boy, standing outside the window looking in at me and I knew. He had joined them. He pulled me up by the hair and out and up a bit of road where there were other boys already packed into a truck. We’re riding deeper and deeper into forest, towards a mountain and one boy says to me, ‘You see that mountain, it is near Pulka.’
The truck stops under trees and we are taken out and put to sleep further up. The ground is all knots. Our guards also sleep, their guns by their sides, ready. When they are well asleep and snoring we whisper:
Oh my God
Oh my God
Oh my God
You deserve our praise
One boy thinks we cannot be too far from Pulka. That is all he knows. We have overheard one of our captors on his phone saying that they are not intending to move on for four days, because of some security scare. On the third night, we will make our escape. We have to go gently. We must not run. No one must make noise. With God’s grace we would make it. The boy said we would not meet a snake or a wild animal because one boy heard that the wild animals had fled the forest on account of gun battles and bombs. In the day when they make us work, gathering firewood, cleaning their cycles and their weapons, we know that they are watching us, but they do not know that in private we are praying. They give us meal in a bowl once a day. We scoop it with our hands. It is soaked in water. It is not like my mother’s meal, soaked in milk. It is not enough to fill us, but we have God’s grace and we are three friends together, going over the mountain to reach Pulka. We do not know anyone in Pulka, but we will ask and someone will help us. We will find our mothers and our fathers in whatever kind of makeshift home they have made. There will be a pastor in a church in Pulka and he will have contacts with many and diverse people. When they are at prayer and not paying any attention to us, we sing the song to ourselves.
Oh my God
Oh my God
Oh my God
You deserve our praise
It gives us courage. When they are sleeping, we practise crawling, and remember that we must not step over any one of them in the dark. They must not hear us running, otherwise they will go Bang Bang and we are finished. We pretend we are snakes crawling on the dirt ground. One of the boys said he ate snake, he and his family ate snake after their father cut the head from it. Their father was getting his own back on the snake world, because he had been bitten once and only that he was brought to the clinic where they had anti-venom, otherwise his father would have died. So they roasted the snake and ate it. It did not taste bad.
We had food. We hid for two days and two nights, far back from the road. We knew they would be following. On the third day, we plucked up our courage and went near the roadside, but still undercover. We were nice and clean because we had found a stream to bathe in. We drank from it. A lorry came full speed at a bend and the leader of our group bolted out, to stop it. It was carrying live chickens. There was a terrible crunch when the lorry stopped and the chickens screeched. There were two men in it. We asked them to help us. We told our story but we were not believed. They got out and told us we had to strip. They said we could be suicide bombers and no matter how we pleaded or protested our innocence, we had to do it. It was not nice, standing there naked and big men looking at us. Finally, we were told to put our clothes back on and they threw us in along with the chickens, who went fluttering and flying about.
It was a day of holy Convocation in a big church. We could hear the singing from a distance. The prophecies of the Messiah were being fulfilled. They dropped us there and people in the church allowed us in. The singing and the preaching made me cry, made me think of Sundays in church at home and my mother and all the ladies in their flowered dresses. Afterwards, we were brought to a tent and given food and Fanta. It was on account of all that praying and singing that my cousins were located, the same cousins where my grandmother had been put. They were surprised at my being brought and my grandmother wept and took me on her lap. They said I would have to sleep in the same room as her and she gave me a sign to show how unhappy she was with them.
One Sunday, they killed a chicken and ate it for their dinner. My grandmother and I got the purply bits of gizzard. We were not even invited to sit at the table with them. My granny whispered to me, ‘We’re not wanted here,’ and that was when she hatched her plan. We would leave. We would go in the night when they were fast asleep. She had bits of furniture that she wanted to bring with her, there was a wooden calabash, spoons, a chair and a table with a lick of yellow paint. She could not be parted from them. We stole out at night and kept to the hills so as not to be seen. My granny couldn’t walk very well, so I backed her. I couldn’t carry the furniture and her together, so I brought her to a secluded place and told her not to move while I went back to get the things. On the way back in the dip between two big hills, I saw the lights of the cycles bounding towards me and before I could hide from them, one was already picking me up by the hair, laughing, laughing. Then I was squeezed in between them, calling out, ‘Granny …Granny,’ and they laughed more.
My granny died in that field and her furniture is elsewhere, rotting.
AND THE LEAVES of the trees are for the healing of nature.
My mother is crying. With joy. She is in the front row. She is wearing her best Sunday wrapper and headdress. I have been given a prize for my essay on trees. I am asked to read it aloud to the entire class and to my teachers. The prize is perfumed paper, lemony in colour, with words printed along the margins – ‘Woods of Windsor’. The paper is decorated with flowers, small sprays of snowdrops in folds of green leaf. It has been rolled into a scroll, with a purple ribbon around it.
I am trying not to be nervous. I know that my friends are laughing at me and also they are jealous:
In our country we depend on trees for our lives. For shelter in rain and for shade in sun. For food of many kinds. They are our second home. Every part of a tree has its purpose. Some, such as mahogany, have oils that both cool and heal hurt skins. Many have leaves that make a savoury sauce for various dishes. Different leaves are brewed to make different flavoured teas. These induce calmness and help nerves. Then there are fruits so varied, so juicy and so succulent. In the kernel of these fruits other nourishments are hidden away, including a paste to make butter from. No one starves, because the whole year round, our trees anticipate our wants. But the most important aspect of the tree is the Tree Spirit. Ancestors who have died liv
e there and govern lives. They ward off evil. If these sacred trees are harmed or lopped or burnt, ancestors get very angry and sometimes take revenge. Crops fail and people go hungry. ‘Don’t step on the spirits,’ my brother Yusuf would say when we did spells in there, tiptoeing over the bony roots that wound and knitted together. It was always at evening time. Birds did not roost there, but at certain times sang some song that was both inexplicably sweet and melancholy.
My mother’s tears have turned to blood. My father stands at the back, his hands folded over the crown of his head. What are they doing to you? he asks, his voice as deep as the morning I last heard it. His eyes are pools of an immense brown, with a well of fire in them. He is preparing to kill my captors.
I come awake on the cookhouse floor, where I must have fallen asleep out of exhaustion. I start to scrape at the clay like an animal scraping to get out. I will never get out. I am here forever. I am asking God to please give me no more dreams. Make me blank. Empty me of all that was.