by Edna O'Brien
The plan was that we would walk at night and count to a thousand steps at a time. She had been told it by a gardener who sometimes came up from the village. However, she said that instead of counting we would sing. The words came back to her easily and jauntily.
Mary come to house oo
Mamma say ‘Na wetin?’
Mary say ‘Na fever.’
Mama call the doctor,
Doctor say ‘Na fever!!!’
Mama boil some water oo
Mary go to bath oo
Hot water, hot water,
Make Mary die!!!
Hot water, hot water,
Make Mary die!
We followed what we thought was the straightest path but how could we tell. We could not even see our own hands. Big trees massed together accruing more darkness, fallen boughs, overhanging branches and posses of thorn bushes that tore at our feet.
Suddenly something furry shot across my instep. I felt its paws, its long nails and the lash of its tail as it shrieked. I also shrieked. Then came the roar of an animal, an avenging roar that was a warning to the other animals all about. They signalled back to it. Obviously, it had been caught in some trap and other animals were answering to it. Birds flew out of the trees in alarm, some with their young in their mouths, and a biggish animal passed me by, dragging a heavy trap with his hind legs. Buki was not with me. She had gone on ahead. As I tightened Babby to my back, I fell face down, clutching at earth that was only slurp. Leaves were still shaking but otherwise the place was silent as though suddenly sacked. I was crying helplessly. Buki came after what seemed a long time. She too was grimed.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, since it was my scream that had set off the furore.
‘We won’t walk again at night … We’ll be babes in the wood,’ she said, and hauled us up. We stood cleaved together, in the splotchy light of a hazed moon and took our first steps, puddling in slime, until we came to a path that ran between big boulders. They opened onto a wide plateau of rock that sprawled for a great distance. Grass grew on it and there were also deep hollows to shelter in. It was where we would spend the remainder of the night.
*
I fell into a heavy sleep and yet I was thinking, We are resting now, we are gathering our courage to go on.
In a dream I saw the roof of our house where it adjoined the granary, the cut corn spread out to dry. Would I be home in time to help with pounding it? In the very next dream my mother is sitting on a chair in the middle of a busy market, with a plate of food on her lap. She is ashamed. She is wearing a shabby, sleeveless brown dress. But you never liked brown, I say. She tells me that the dress has been donated. So we are poorer than when I left. She’s being asked by a policeman to verify my first name, our family name and my exact age. As she begins to answer, she gets flustered and the plate falls from her lap. I waken with a jolt. Something is beating on my chest. It is Babby, her fists on my breastbone, trying to tap it open. She seems to be pleading with me, saying, I know there is not much milk, I know there is none, but I am asking to be held. I hold her tight, tighter. It was her sighing that moved me the most, so plaintive, so sad, like a very old, sad person. I traced my finger over her face, the skin silken and now moist, a night flower that hides by day. Then I put two fingers inside her mouth and all along her gums, feeling for where her milk teeth would sprout.
‘Things will get better,’ I said. I believed that she knew. In her child’s way she seemed to grasp what was happening.
*
A morning mist hovered above the ground. We marched through it. We stamped on it. Our sleep had made us purposeful. We passed a clearing where black sluggish water crept out of a soggy hole and was undrinkable. Buki said that in the valley down below we would be certain to find a water hole and rivers. She had dreamt of her school days and the nice teacher who read them a fable every Friday. In her sleep the words of the fable returned to her exactly as she had heard it.
Uban da dansa. Fathers and sons:
Once upon a time there was a farmer whose newly planted farm was being destroyed by some animals. One evening the farmer set a net trap for the marauding animals, in the hope that they would bring food. When he went back the next morning he found six goats and a dog under the net. ‘Release me, I beg you,’ cried the dog to the farmer, ‘for I have eaten none of your crops, nor have I done you any harm. I am a poor innocent dog, as you may see – a most dutiful father—’ but the farmer cut him short. ‘All this may be true enough, I dare say, but I have caught you with those destroying my crops, and you must suffer with the company in which you are found.’
We came on something very strange. It was by a creek, with only a little water, and the reeds soaking up what was left of it. There were stones in the middle, black and white stones crammed together. A man, spider-thin, was sitting on a fallen log. He was wrapped in a dirty sheet, like an old dressing gown and he had a plastic bag on his head to keep off the sun. He held an empty bottle in his hand, clutched it with the need of a child. At first he had seemed to us to be dead but then he took us in, his eyes staring out of his shaven skull. We knelt to show our respect, but he did not want that, so we got up.
‘Is there a village near here, Uncle?’ Buki asked. She had to say it three times. He gave her a cold, slighting look.
‘We are just trying to get home, Uncle,’ she said pleading.
‘Yonder,’ he said and with his bony wrist waved us away.
Nearby was a tree, struck by lightning. Not a single bud or leaf clung to it. Its boughs were bleached and underneath there was the frame of a carcass of an animal. It had no smell.
As we went on down, Buki saw what looked like a grove and she ran to explore. Someone, or maybe nature herself, had tried to cultivate an orchard there. The bunches of mango were small, cheek to cheek, along the thin drooping branches. They did not have the red blush and golden skins of mangoes in the markets at home, but we ate them anyhow. They tasted sour, like pickles.
Then she took Babby in her arms and went in search of better fare.
From one enormous tree, three lesser trees had sprung, leaving a big hole in the bark that gaped like an open mouth.
‘Don’t,’ I said but her hand was already inside it, rummaging and tossing things out – twigs, dead leaves and a brown beak, which was all that was left of some hibernating bird. Lastly she pulled out hunks of a jellied substance that she held aloft. In the light, it seemed like ropes of yellow-hued necklace. She tasted it. I did the same. It tasted medicinal. Babby spat hers out. Buki took her in her arms and said they would go on a hunt. She was more playful than I was and I secretly resented that Babby loved her more. Deep within the crusted bark of a certain tree she found amber capsules that contained drops of juice with a delicious tart flavour.
*
It was an army camp fairly recently abandoned. There were old clothes, socks and cartridge shells thrown about. There was also a water hole with a metal dipper, but no water flowed. She turned the wheel and we waited and heard a trickle and then a gush of water, deep from the earth’s bounty. We drank mug after mug of it.
Behind were the remains of a building, probably where animals were once housed, and a lean-to that led to an open porch. The porch is full of boxes, metal boxes with letters in bright silver engraved on them: MRE. Meals ready to eat. MEALS: READY TO EAT.
We go through box after box, only to find that they are empty. But something tells her not to give up and she comes back waving a polythene pouch with a bag inside it, also with silver lettering, that tells us it contains ‘Beans and sausages’. There is a cartoon with instructions on how to use it. It involves pulling a string that dangles to one side and we learn that if it is correctly applied the outside bag will open and the temperature inside will go from freezing to the desired heat. We are to allow twenty minutes’ cooking time. But we dare not risk it. Anything could go wrong. Better to eat the stuff cold. She tears a folded flap along the top, but this bag is too tightly sealed. We try with o
ur teeth, gnawing and biting, until finally she gets a stone and punches holes in it. As she does, small slivers of ice fall out. Beans are coated in a tomato sauce and the sausages, which are thick, are cut up into small chunks. We stuff ourselves. We found goggles, donned them and swanned around having imaginary talks with officers. Seeing that we were skittish, Babby also wanted to play. She was in no mood for sleep. She kept prattling and taking each of our hands to be hoisted in the air. She was so wide awake we had to take turns with her.
Buki picked up a stone and put it in one or other hand that I had to choose from. It was my turn to have the first hour of sleep. I found an old army coat with a big collar and wrapped myself in it.
*
We went on next morning, buoyant and full of purpose, until we hit a storm and were tossed about in all directions. A desert wind keened and the whirling sand swirled in a mad rage. We were shouting to one another but unable to hear. Babby was slipping off my back, like loose luggage. I dimly remembered Buki calling to me but it was too late. I am sliding down into a chamber of darkness. She too slipped as she tried to save me and fell into that crumbling pit. Our cries to one another are swallowed in swills of sand. She groped so as to test the walls to see if she could scale them, but small tussocks with wisps of grass came off in her hand.
She finds one wall where sand and mud have combined to give a slightly stronger footing. She makes grooves in it, not deep enough to settle in, just small foot holes to enable her to scale it. She makes four in all. She will go first and then I will throw Babby up and lastly I will follow.
‘We have to.’ That is all she says.
I watch her toe settle into the first groove and I see the frightened wobble of her heel. She reaches for a second footing, makes it and after four steps she pauses. She is trying to be jovial as she stands like someone in a circus, on a tightrope entertaining an audience. She begins to claw and make careful thrusts, until she reaches the edge, then hoists herself over and shouts down. Babby is next. I take off my wrapper and fold her tight in it. I stretch on tiptoe, higher, higher as Buki strains and reaches to catch her. At the moment she is handed over I hear her cry, a cry of astonishment.
Now it is my turn. I am ashamed of my terror. I take the first, then the second groove and feel for the tiny cavity of the third and the fourth. I am perched there, when something on the other side of fear emboldens me and drives me on. All I want is for the tip of Buki’s fingers to touch mine so that I know I am safe. I do something unwise. My mind had no part in it, it was all impulse. I slid back down.
I can hear Buki gasping as she pulled and pulled to get me halfway up. The wall of sand, which I am clawing, is flaking. I cling to nothing. It is now only a matter of minutes before these walls collapse. She is no longer shouting, she has no breath left, just tugging and tugging until finally my brow is over the edge and I bite the earth. The wind has died down. Buki is standing above me, limp with exhaustion.
‘I am sorry,’ I finally manage to say.
‘You’re here,’ she says, smiling.
It was the best of all knowing and feeling and forgiving.
*
We have to find water to wash as we are caked in sand. We walk a long distance and finally we come on a water hole with a gourd hanging on a piece of wire. First we drink. It tastes of clay and matter. Our thirst is so great that we drink it anyhow, we slurp it. Babby also slurps hers. Then we wash her and take turns at ladling water over our bodies. We wash our wrappers and hang them on a tree to dry.
We have been sitting for some time when suddenly we hear something in the sky. The sound is faint, like the distant buzzing of bees. We are naked, like the first man and woman in the Bible. The machine that we occasionally glimpse moves with stealth, like a glider. It is veering in our direction. We know it is not the militants as they did not have planes, so we are jumping up and down, reckless with happiness. We pull the wrappers from the trees and wave them, frantic and giddy. It dips silently over a belt of trees and towards a clearing that is almost directly above us. We are hoarse from shouting. Then just as we are expecting it to land, with men rushing out, bearing sheets or blankets, our hopes are vanquished. It dips sideways under an awning of cloud, then under massed cloud, vanishing into the distance from where it had first appeared. It had not come for us. Buki remembered that it was a drone. Countries from all over the world sent them into other countries in order to spy. They were just machines, gathering information that would be sent back, by satellite, to some alien territory.
‘There was no one in it,’ she said.
‘So why did it come?’
‘They comb the skies now … they’re a new tactic of war.’
‘But it saw us?’
‘But we were nothing to them.’
We stood, our hands across our timid bodies, ashamed of ourselves.
*
We rounded a bend and saw something we had hoped never to see again. The old man was gone, the creek almost dried up, stones rasping in the heat. The reeds now yellowed with thirst. She was furious. She blamed herself. How could we have gone so astray.
‘We mustn’t quarrel,’ I said.
‘We are not quarrelling,’ she said. Then she went to the tree that had been struck by lightning, determined to break off the last remaining branch. It did not want to come away. She pulled and strove. She persevered with it until her fingers bled. What came off was a stick, the flesh at its ends white and splintered. She swung it in all directions and railed at the heavens.
‘Let’s think,’ I said.
‘Of what?’ she said sharply and went off.
The worst thing was the sameness, the same big trees, the same treetops, patchy light filtering through, same thorn bushes, same baked earth with no shade, and us literally dying of thirst. Never since we escaped did this forest, those trees, this vaulting sky seem so alien, so malignant, so pitiless and so indifferent to us. We were at the rim of existence and we knew it.
When Buki returned I could see she had cried her eyes out. She was staring down at the ground and scoring it with the end of her stick.
‘What do you want to do?’ she asked.
‘I want to go on,’ I said.
As we walked, in silence, I remembered a shrine we had crept into late one evening. It was hidden away in a grove, a little structure, with its door unlocked. We went in on tiptoe. Everything was topsy-turvy. There was an after-smell of burning and clay pots were broken and scattered about. We saw the charred feet of chicken legs and discoloured cockscombs. Images had been defaced. Buki said it had been vandalised. She recognised that it was where the tree worshippers came for their secret rituals in the dead of night. She said they were not evil, they were good people and yet someone wanted to harm them. They worshipped a different God from ours, but they did not kill.
Outside birds were hidden in the trees, hermit birds singing their little hearts out.
‘Maybe they will come back,’ I said, meaning the tree worshippers.
‘They won’t,’ she said, with a terrible finality.
AFTER THE TRUDGE, the thorns, the hunger and our short tempers, we are reconciled. We glimpse happiness. There it was waiting for us, a little ruin smothered in wild grasses, blackish thatch sprouting from the roof. A broken chair had been left outside, as if someone had just vacated it. The door had fallen off its hinges.
Buki found it, as I had stopped to feed Babby and suddenly, through a barricade of trees, I hear her calling and I am surprised at her eagerness, since she had been so surly.
We stood on the threshold, unsure at first, and then went in. The roof leaked and the drip-drip of water onto the clay floor was a lingering entreaty. Mildew over everything, a grey fuzzy coating along the clay walls, utensils and plates overturned and a saddish orange cover across the narrow bed. She found a rush basket full of things, a scissors, a torn sheet of a magazine with pictures of paint tins and a sign that read ‘Home decorating’. There was also a blanket laden with dust. She fo
und a man’s squashed straw hat and plonked it on Babby. There was a watch, which she shook and put to her ear and then put to my ear and for an instant it ticked. Then it stopped. We found a cigarette lighter in a bright red case, the wick torn and sooted. She flipped the catch again and again, begging it for just one little spark. There was a green candle in a tall bottle, with blobs of green wax crusted on the nozzle. We had no matches.
Outside, two water barrels overflowed and a stream ran down from the hills. In a shed we found a shovel, a hoe, a yard brush and grass seeds that had been packed in a jute bag.
The garden, light and sunny, was a riot of weeds and on the ground, the rotting apple butts were infested with worms. Bits of coloured wool, cloth flowers and the silver wrapping of a chocolate bar were tied on the posts, to discourage predators. In a neatly dredged patch, the purple flower of the potato blossomed here and there. She knelt and pulled a few stalks up. Some had small knots of potatoes covered in clay, which she shook off. She counted them. On black posts, some of which had fallen down, there were affectionate reminders of the previous owner. He had tried to grow a flowering shrub but all that remained were black leaves and the frayed yellowish pollen of dog roses.
We set about cleaning the kitchen. We washed the floor, the trestle table, the broken chair and the various utensils. We ran the broom up and down the walls until they were their dun colour again, the fungus gone. We took turns beating the blanket. We beat it with a fury, as if we were beating our captors and the more they cried for mercy, the harder we struck with the handle of that broom or that shovel. We washed Babby in an old tub and then washed ourselves, half gleeful, half shivering and lastly, we washed our hair and let it dry in the sun.
To make fire she needed to practise alone. When she was young, boys and girls went into the bush on Saturdays on adventures. Boys hunted hares and rabbits, while the girls searched for snails. Then they made fire by rubbing stones together and the one boy who excelled at it thought himself to be Mr Superman. The snails, as she recalled, tasted delicious, tastier than when they were cooked at home in a pan.