by Edna O'Brien
That was how things started, just by their seeing one another. Always that distance, that in its depths sought nearness.
I thought, I am awake but dreaming. I am dreaming this boy and this girl who have just met, yet with an unspoken pact between them. I dreamed them, because I knew I could not ever dream anything like that happening for myself.
*
I was sitting on the bed when my Madara came in. There was something wrong. Her big smile was not there. I thought that maybe she had had a quarrel with one of the men. It was the formality in her voice that made my heart lurch, but it did not occur to me that it was about me. Why was she so cold, so aloof. She did not sit down. She spoke standing and her voice was firm. ‘When the women went to the village this morning, the vendors at first refused to speak or do business with them. Word had got out that we were hiding a militant’s wife and child. Everyone down there is in terror. They know what will happen. Their goods will be confiscated, their stalls burned down and they themselves slaughtered. Then the Jihadis will come here for us, they know how to find us, they know every inch of this forest. They will destroy everything. They will take our herd. There will be nothing left of us.’
‘I will go,’ I said half rising, wanting to thank her for the endless kindnesses, but she rebutted it.
‘My son will take you both, before it is light. He has gone to the village to borrow a cycle,’ she said, as she moved away from me.
Close to breaking, she turned and said, ‘We hate to send anyone away … especially children,’ then made her way under the carpeted curtain that served as a doorway.
THE PLACE WAS DEATHLY SILENT, surrounded by trees, the building itself completely disguised with leaves that were themselves squeezed into wire mesh. Some of the older brown leaves stuck out and it was that crinkly sound that I then heard.
The boy on the cycle had dropped us a distance away and sped for his life.
I recognised it was the military post, because of the sandbags piled around it and wires jutting from the roof. Men are shouting at me. There are two of them in baggy military attire, hoisting their guns. One fires into the air, so that the birds fly out in frenzy. There is the sudden flapping of wings, birds not knowing what direction to take and the lower branches swirling violently. The hush of dawn is broken. The second one takes phones from his pockets, and untangles the various cords.
‘Drop her … drop her,’ is being yelled at me. I put Babby on the sandy earth, where she lies, silent and stricken. Never had she looked so forlorn, an abandoned parcel that could be kicked or trodden in an instant. She screams when they run the metal rod over her and goes into convulsions. I am not allowed to lift her up.
‘Take your belt off … Take it off,’ one says, and I realise that they think I have come on a mission to blow them up. They assume I am a suicide bomber, I am one of the little girls that I had seen under the tamarind tree, eating the dates that she had just been given, and childishly excited because of being promised Paradise.
‘I have no belt … I have no weapon … I just want to go home,’ I said.
‘She just wants to go home,’ one said with a snigger. He tells me to undress.
‘Shake them … shake them,’ I am told and after I have done it, I have to undress her then, as the metal rod has to be trained over both our bodies. She jumps as if she is being electrocuted.
One fires questions and the other records everything on his telephone:
‘What is your name?’
‘Who sent you?’
‘Who is the person who brought you on the cycle?’
‘Why did he leave so fast?’
‘Name your father.’
‘Name your mother.’
‘Name the elders in your village.’
‘Why don’t you remember?’
‘If you lie you know what will happen to you.’
I answer as best I can, but I know that they are trying to catch me out. Then they hurry towards the building, to report on my arrival, change their minds and retrace, as once again the rod is trained over us and over the harmless pieces of clothing on the ground.
They hate me. I can tell by the way they look at me. All they want is to find a way to prove that I am guilty, arrest me on the spot and have me sent to a barracks, then a place of death.
A third man, a commander in a more elaborate uniform, comes down the steps. Ridiculously, they stand and give him the formal salute. He is tall and gangly. He does not seem so het up as his subordinates. I tell him that I have no belt and that I have no button to press and that I am not here to blow anyone up. He takes it in, then asks how can he believe me.
‘How can I believe you?’ he says for the second time.
‘I would rather blow myself up than blow other people …’ I answer. He looks at me, stares into my eyes, to see if I am lying. He turns to the others and says that it is more likely I am one of the schoolgirls. It shows in the eyes, the trauma in the sockets of the eyes and the hunted look. He has seen it before.
‘What age are you?’ I tell him that I don’t know.
‘High-profile,’ he says, irked now that this whole business is going to take time, a lot of time, exceptional circumstances and so forth. He looks on the phone, where he can read the questions they have put to me and the answers I have haltingly given. Then he takes long strides back into the building.
Left alone with them, one goes to where my clothes lie on the ground and undoes the knot at the corner of my wrapper, having noticed where money was hidden. It was the money Mahmoud gave me. I had kept it throughout. It was to be our gift to my parents when Buki and I got home. She strengthened that knot many times. He pockets the money, knowing that I won’t report him, that I daren’t.
The tall man returns and gives the order to take me inside. Without deferring to any one of them, I pick up my wrapper, partially cover myself, then pick up Babby and tuck her shawl around her – a petrified parcel.
The room is small and stifling hot. Guns stacked against the wall and weapons piled everywhere. He takes a cylinder with a long snout and pointing to a trip wire, says if I had stepped on that, I would not now be availing myself of his hospitality. There is a table with a brick under one of the legs to keep it from wobbling and a calendar with a cellophane window showing the exact date. He sees me look at it, mesmerised. A time, a day, a season.
He sat me at the table and told me to write a report so that it can be conveyed to HQ, who are already getting hot under the collar.
I write of our capture, the work we were made to do, the cooking, the cleaning, the prayers, the regular beatings, but I do not include the savageries in the Blue House. I say I was married, gave birth and how, along with Buki, we escaped when the government bombarded the settlement. I describe girls dead on the ground, and others left behind with every hope of theirs extinguished. I tell of the hut and the fire that Buki made and how she was bitten by a snake and died. He reads it over my shoulder while I write.
‘How do you know it was a snake bite?’
‘She told me … she had gone out in the dark to forage and when she was pulling up a root, she felt the bite … I saw the bright red marks of its fangs.’
‘Ah, the venomous creatures,’ he says and from a shelf above the table, he fetched a manual. With it, another book fell, that was titled Great Expectations. It had a picture of a dirt floor with men in caps and overalls and hens pecking in a blacksmith’s forge. He reads aloud – ‘Snake bite advice – Dos and Don’ts … Facts and Myths.’ Then quickly, he tosses it aside.
Once again he is suspicious, muttering, ‘something rotten in the state of Denmark’ and so forth. What if I am not telling the truth. What if I have left something out, something portentous. He says I am a puzzle, nay an enigma. I have walked through an immense forest, rife with dangers, landmines, hunters, different militia, thirst, hunger, and yet I arrive at this military post, albeit in shock, but in one piece. There must be some mystery.
‘The herders foun
d me … They saved me,’ I tell him. He ponders it and after some time seems to believe me.
‘What is going to happen to me?’ I ask. He can’t say. The big brass in the city are now studying my case, X saying one thing, Y saying another. Stasis. Obfuscation. Disagreement. I might be moved on to a more up-to-date military base, his little unit being so rudimentary. He apologises if the buffoons have been heavy-handed, but I must realise that to them I am not a girl, I am not even a person, I am the portent of death, I am a decoy, sent to create a distraction before an attack.
He sat on the stool next to me, saying there was something I must know. Human nature had turned diabolical. The country as I had left it was no more, houses torched while people slept inside them, farmers no longer able to till their land, people fleeing from one hungry wasteland to another, devastation. A woman pouring her own faeces on her head and her children’s heads each morning, to deceive the Dogs, to delude them into believing they were all mad.
‘Only a few days previous, a woman arrived at the post with a dead infant, claiming she could not bury it without first killing a goat. Could I find her a goat. Could I kill it. No burial was complete without this. Hopelessly, she lay down on the path where you stood, and after she had cried her fill, she got up and went on, bewailing her predicament.’
One of the buffoons rushes in, to say the satellite is down.
‘Fix it … Get it back up,’ he shouts, and seeing that I have cowered, he apologises and asks if I am thirsty. With alacrity, he pours water from a jerrycan into a tin mug, with flaps at the side that serve as a shaky handle.
‘You find me unhinged,’ he said then, and launched into a spiel of his life:
‘I go home every six weeks or so and I am a stranger to my family. They sneer behind my back. My daughter says I must see a therapist, so morose am I. We argue. I refuse to see a therapist, I hurry back here to this cradle of evil, I see the buffoons take turns with the hammock I had specially built for my injured leg. I have come, you might say, for the last act. Same trees, same darkness, same looming uncertainty. Why am I telling you this … Because I do not know you, and, moreover, you do not know me and you do not know the world you have come back to.’
From the table drawer he takes a newspaper cutting and reads the most recent statistics – ‘In this country up to two million people have fled their homes, 1.9 million people are currently displaced, 5.2 million people are without food and an estimated 450,000 children under five are suffering from severe malnutrition.’
While he was talking, Babby was tetchy, and tugging at me to be fed. He saw how embarrassed I was and got up, hitting at the table wireless and looking outside to see if there had been any developments. It took time to feed her as she was unsettled in this rowdy place and kept losing the nipple. I was still holding her when he came back in. He just stared at us, not uttering a single word until she had finished. Then I burped her, and gradually she drifted off into a doze.
‘How do you feel?’ he asked me.
‘I am good, thanks.’
‘You are good, thanks,’ he exclaimed in disbelief. What was it, this symbiosis of mother and child. He had to admit that watching me, it awakened something in him, something good, an attachment maybe or a sunset or the beautiful cadences of Charles Dickens. He gets carried away in praise of mothers. Barefoot, supplicant, living on scraps and yet carrying on, carrying on. They do not cut their throats. They do not cut their children’s throats and drink the blood. They bear it, just as they have borne their children. He asks how they do it, these mothers with children, how do they do it, how do you do it. His face was within inches of mine, his eyes so questing.
‘Make me feel,’ he said.
‘Don’t send me back to them,’ I said.
It shook him. He looked abashed. He picked up a cardboard box with MOD printed on it, lifted the lid and plonked it on my lap. There were fruit bars, biscuits, energy drinks, dried meats and cheeses. From the selection he pulled out a bag of toffees, handed me one and then helped himself. We sat there, chewing our toffees like two errant children. When he had finished, he folded the piece of paper into the shape of an aeroplane and sent it skiving out in search of news from beyond. I read the lettering on the box – Twenty-four-hour Multi-climate Ration Pack. He asked was it not ironic that the grub no longer deemed worthy for an English garrison was sold to him and his cohorts. Likewise, the soon to be defunct weapons. He got carried away. He cited history. The colonisers come for the spoils, the gold and the ivory, mocking the quaint customs, the witch doctors, the witch dances, the rainmakers, the cannibals, yet quietly becoming attached to the place. He reckoned that certain English drawing rooms would be full of charming memorabilia, swords, knives, cutlasses, maps, and old photographs of men and their ladies lounging on terraces at sundown. He even ventured that in the basements of various museums, there would be severed heads, pickled in salt, that had once been a feature and openly displayed in glass cases.
One of the buffoons came rushing in to say that a top general wished to speak with him, at once.
I was told to go outside. It was getting light, the sun had risen as it had indeed each morning, but never ventured down into our cursed enclave. I hold her tight, tighter. I talk to her. I wonder where we will lay our heads this night.
The buffoon who had stolen the money from my wrapper came and stood very close to me, and smelt me as if I was a dog. It was his way of telling me that the money also smelt. His way of silencing me.
From then on it was a question of being sent in and out, listening to them speaking on their phones but unable to guess if there had been any developments. The commander was more brusque, telling me to go back inside as it seems the satellite worked better out of doors.
It may have been the heat or dread or tiredness, but I have fallen asleep on the stool and am dreaming. I know that I am dreaming:
I am crossing a field with Buki and Babby. We each have her by the hand. She must be older, because she has learned to walk. We are scared. There are shapes behind the trees and hidden in the bushes. We have to get past them and also past a big house that is a madhouse. I know it is a madhouse but I don’t know how I know. It has small windows that are barred. In the layers of hedging all around, rats are trying to scramble out. Rats and their young. We can hear them nibbling at the wire and squealing as their tongues are cut. We shift towards the middle of the field, where there are mounds. Buki has gone, disappeared. I walk with Babby and hold her so that she doesn’t trip. Then there is a strange and marvellous occurrence. A panel of earth begins to move slowly towards her, then completely effaces her chest, shielding her all the way down to her ankles, a sort of armour. We walk on, regaled. In the distance there is a house. It is lit up.
I waken with a jolt. The commander has returned, saying as yet there is no definite decision, except that he seems more hopeful.
He decides to buoy us up with a moment from Charles Dickens and his voice, as he reads, grows mellower.
‘I was in England again – in London, and walking along Piccadilly with little Pip – when a servant came running after me to ask would I step back to a lady in a carriage who wished to speak to me. It was a little pony carriage, which the lady was driving, and the lady and I looked sadly enough on one another. “I am greatly changed I know, but I thought you would like to shake hands with Estella too, Pip. Lift up that pretty little child and let me kiss it!” (She supposed the child, I think, to be my child.) I was very glad afterwards to have had the interview; for, in her face, and in her voice, and in her touch, she gave me the assurance that suffering had been stronger than Miss Havisham’s teaching and had given her a heart to understand what my heart used to be.’
Someone had entered and when I turned and looked I saw it was a policewoman, with her navy cap peaked at a jaunty angle.
‘We are taking you to the city,’ she said as she helped me and Babby up.
I forget the walk down the path, I forget everything except for being i
nside a big car, the leather seats smelling of wax. There were two other cars, one in front and one behind.
The policewoman had to wind the window down because the commander wished to say one last thing:
‘It was all … all … quite … miraculous,’ he said. Then with a flourish we are waved on. He looked forlorn.
The buffoons stood to attention, their chests puffed out at having fulfilled their duties.
THE CITY IS TEEMING with life. Cars, motorcycles and taxis all edging their way in and out, the taxis no bigger than perambulators. Passengers are squeezed into them, their belongings on their laps. Babby is sound asleep in my arms, despite all the jangle.
Sun beats down on stark white buildings, their black gates ablaze with spears of gold. Watchmen sit under the shade of the trees, chatting with policemen who stroll around. Other policemen stand in narrow white booths, directing traffic and stopping cars. Our car is waved on, because of a military flag attached to the side of the bonnet.
The policewoman pointed to what seemed a mountain, but was in fact a rock, a rock so famous that its picture featured on the currency notes. She spoke of its fabled history and the many assaults attached to it. Water ran down its sides into the innumerable veins, like endless tears of lamentation.