Girl

by Edna O'Brien

  The trees are not as ample as the ones I cowered under in the forest. Younger trees bordered the lanes of the motorways, their leaves wrapped around their trunks, like folded umbrellas.

  In between the stately villas are shacks made of assorted things – cardboard, wattles, bamboo, and here and there a panel of zinc roofing rasps in the sunlight. Women are stooped over their small cooking fires, with hordes of children needing to be fed. On cement walls, painted signs for fridge repairs, motor repairs and one in jet black that read Call Mr Chef, with a phone number beside it. On a huge hoarding in coloured letters I see the edict Become a Millionaire. Underneath it, someone had scrawled Cotton is the Creation of God.

  At a busy intersection where four roads met, two young boys without legs whizzed around on skateboards, their hands outstretched and when a coin was tossed, they raced each other to be first. Different youths tapped on the window whenever our car came to a standstill. They were holding up crayons, flip-flops, bottled water and little plastic bags of mixed nuts. The policewoman told me to ignore them.

  We arrived at sets of double gates that led into parkland, where there were numerous buildings, also a glistening white, and long flights of steps up to the entrances. Various officials greeted us. Then a woman came forward and called me ‘Pet. Pet.’ She said that baby could do with a nappy and we were brought straight to the bathroom, which was an abode of marble and mirrors. Beside the washbasin was a tray to change her and she kicked with glee, her eyes roaming at the opulence of her new surroundings. I caught sight of myself in many mirrors and gasped at the alien creature I had become, my mouth full of sores and my hair in splices. Babby was almost toppling off that tray, but I caught her just in time and marched us around to gape at each other. She pointed to the two images in the mirrors, not knowing who they were. The woman who called me Pet was rapping on the door, as doctors were waiting to examine the baby.

  I am in a small consulting room, with the woman sitting opposite me, telling me how brave I am and how resilient. I am a survivor. She is trying to put me at my ease. She says I will have tests, injections, vaccinations, treatments of different kinds, but most of all, it will be a ‘listening therapy’. They are there to be humane, to be supportive. She wore a plain, short-sleeved dress and leather sandals with shiny buckles. From the peepholes in the leather, I begin to see pink worms wriggling out. I cannot stop trembling. She asks if maybe I want to talk, but I don’t. She takes a little calendar from her pocket and starts to calculate and add up the number of days I have been in captivity. The calendar has a picture of different saints for each month. She shows me her favourite – St Teresa, the Little Flower, a girl with fine features, and for a necklace, a garland of pink rosebuds. Then she opens the page on St Patrick, an imposing man brandishing his crozier. St Patrick, the patron saint of Ireland, who, in the year ad 432, banished all snakes, human and reptile, from her country. She went on to say would that he might be resurrected, he might put a stop to the carnage and abominations that were happening all around.

  ‘How old am I?’ I ask.

  ‘Oh, you poor child … you’re hurting … you’re hurting,’ she says. Then from inside her dress she takes a brown cloth scapular, kisses it and tells me it is mine. I feel the hidden engraving of some saint’s face, tucked into the cloth.

  ‘Hold that when they’re cutting you … but they’ll be kind enough,’ she says as an afterthought.

  At that very moment the door is pushed in and two men in white are wheeling a trolley. They put a gown over me that ties at the back. They have white masks over their mouths. I think they are messengers from heaven.

  The woman walks beside me as I am being wheeled along the corridor. She is holding my hand, squeezing it, uttering – ‘Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy, Lord have mercy.’ Endlessly.

  ‘IF YOU SMILED, you would be far prettier,’ he said. If I smiled! He is the doctor assigned to bring me back, he says it take fourteen days for the human mind to readjust.

  He will have seen from the various notes on his desk, written by others, that I am withdrawn, that I am sometimes listless and that I am given to irrational bouts of anger. He will also know that I tore up the veil they gave me. It was the glowering blue that the Dogs had dressed us in. He knows that I am afraid to cross the road and that twice I have refused the offer of a walk in the park with a nurse.

  ‘You are no longer in that forest,’ he says.

  ‘You weren’t there,’ I say hastily, too hastily.

  I am shackled to it. It lives inside me. It is what I dream at night, with a baffled Babby slung across my belly, imbibing my terrors.

  Daylight comes at last. Fruits cut up in wedges for our breakfast. She picks out a piece of melon or papaya, studies it and then plonks it in her mouth. A little glutton in a pink high chair.

  I want to scream at this man in his dark suit and his jellyish eyes behind thick curved lenses. Not once has he touched the water in a little plastic cup set down before him. I drink mine and stare into space. If only he had an instrument or a wand that he could put inside my head then everything would be revealed and there would be no need for these hesitations. He asks if I like my room. Have I remembered to take my medicines. Is my child’s health improving. To each and every question I nod yes.

  ‘I should have kept the placenta,’ I say abruptly.

  ‘Why should you have kept the placenta?’

  ‘They ate it … she could hide in it if we are ever separated.’

  ‘You won’t be.’

  ‘But how do you know?’

  He sees the fear welling up in me and pauses.

  *

  I tell him things, in order not to tell him things:

  I sieved corn and prayed. The chaff blew about and the wind hurled it into the hard desert dust. I cut up rumps and saddles and bush meat, flies and worms swarming on them. John-John swatted the flies with a cricket bat and I decapitated the worms with my sharp knife. They wriggled even when dead. John-John found the cricket bat in an abandoned camp, where he also found a book on the rules of cricket. I did not pray hard enough. Rebeka prayed and she escaped.

  ‘Who is Rebeka?’ he asks.

  ‘Maybe she died,’ I answer.

  Then I tell him about Norah, a little girl who was helping her aunt to mind the flock and lost contact with them. She was about ten years old. They got scattered. She was running around calling, calling when she was captured in the hills. The soldier who caught her was smitten with her. He took her as his. She said she was too young. He said, You have relatives, you have an aunt, I can go after them. She used to come up to the swamp, blood running down her legs, calling, calling. Dawo, dawo, dawo. Come back … come back … come back.

  He knows there is more to be said but that I cannot tell it. Between us there is this yawning chasm.

  ‘When is my mother coming?’ I ask, brusquely.

  ‘All is under consideration,’ he says.

  I think how my mother is waiting every hour for the summons to come and bring me home. Just as I too wait.

  *

  I am in talkative mood telling him of the Black Day. Twelve girls were told to wash and cover themselves nicely. They were given porridge before setting out. There was going to be a swap. Twelve girls would be released for fifteen of their fighters who were in prisons in the city. Those of us who were left behind felt wronged and embittered.

  They arrived back in the dormitory in the middle of the night, broken and deranged, too shattered to talk. They were without headdresses. Either the thorn trees had torn them off or they pulled them off themselves in an act of defiance. They lay on the floor and howled. We made a circle around them. We were all together then.

  Over the days and the weeks we learned what happened although the story differed with the time and they had become so muddled that they contradicted each other. This much we knew. They had walked over fifteen kilometres in roasting heat. They arrived at a small clearing that had been recently cut and young grass
sprouted from it. The plane was already there, a small white plane with the propellers rusted. The old trees that had been felled lay around like sleeping animals. From inside the plane they could hear singing and shouting. The prisoners were impatient to be let out, to go down those steps to where their brothers waited and kiss the forest that they called home.

  People from both sides were meeting and dispersing, sometimes friendly, sometimes not. Most of them took shelter in their trucks and those in charge of the paperwork sat under huge umbrellas. There was a tall man in a white kaftan, acting as mediator.

  The girls were not offered even a drink of water. Although faint, they believed that soon they would be going up those narrow steps into that plane, where they would be welcomed and buckled into a seat and maybe offered a nice cool drink and a welcome.

  Many hours went by.

  There were small differences between the two sides and sometimes harsh words were exchanged. Then there was shouting and cursing and vengeances were vowed and clods of earth were thrown at the plane itself.

  Then they knew that something had gone very wrong. The man in the white kaftan threw his arms up and in several languages said he had wasted a year of his life on these negotiations. They knew for certain when an officer who had been inside the plane, obviously guarding the prisoners, stood on the top step holding an open suitcase, brandishing it and shouting at the Jihadis on the ground. He had been guaranteed a sum of money, which was not forthcoming. He waved it frantically. It was old and battered and the lining was ripped. Everything became uglier and more threatening. They laughed, relishing their hatred, each side certain of the future annihilation of the other.

  The mediator had gone. The plane door was shut. The trucks were moving away and the girls were ordered to turn around and walk the fifteen kilometres back.

  I could not go on. I reached for one of the paper tissues in the box that I had never dared to touch.

  He said nothing, did nothing, just listened as I described the girls still there, clinging to the belief that one day they would walk towards that clearing, the new grass, the small white plane with its propellers turning for lift-off.

  *

  I cannot believe that I am actually confessing to my nightly slaughter. It gets gorier with each night’s dream. I am boiling my captors, in big black pots. Many fires are lit. These men know their time is up. They beg for mercy the way we begged. I pile them into the pots and John-John is assisting me with the pounder. We smash their skulls and their brains ooze out in a kind of murky mush. Their beards float on the surface like rotting scum. The boiling water rises up around them so that they are silenced. They have to eat of themselves, their eyes craved with crying, except they cannot cry, being dead.

  Girls are running free from the dormitory, throwing off their vestures of shame. They wash in the rivers. They smell clean. They smell of nature again. They eat mushrooms. They bind their hair with juniper twigs. Word has gone on ahead. From the villages, families have set out, bringing dates and singing the old songs.

  He removes his glasses, wipes them thoughtfully and looks at me.

  ‘One day, you will open your heart to someone,’ he says and rises.

  It was our last session together. We had broken the ice.

  AT FIRST SIGHT of each other, my mother and I gasped, a gasp that only we could comprehend. Too much had happened. She had changed beyond recognition, torn by sorrows. She looked older, and her eyes were bleary. It was in the hall of a government building and she was out of breath from the last climb of steps. People were guiding us, making sure that we did not feel too intimidated in such grand surroundings.

  Judith, the young American nurse who had seen me a few times, rushed in, her hair all tangled, so as to give me a gift. It was a rubber ball that I could squeeze whenever I felt the heebie-jeebies coming back.

  ‘Squash the bastards … Squash the bastards,’ she said, cupping the ball between the palms of my hands.

  Mama and I were allowed a few moments alone in a reception room. It had to be quick because the President was flying back from somewhere, especially to greet us.

  The room we were led into was very large, with a long table and chairs down the length of either side. There was a flask of coffee on a tray, along with cups, saucers and a packet of biscuits.

  ‘Don’t ask me anything,’ I said.

  ‘I won’t,’ she said.

  It was there that she broke it to me that my father was dead. From the moment I was captured, my father was never the same. He went up and down roads saying my name. He built a wooden seat under forked trees that looked out onto three adjoining roads so that he could see me coming. He said my name when he talked in his sleep. That was how she realised he was dead. He was no longer repeating my name. His heart gave out. I wondered why she was so distant and why she had not embraced me. I put it down to the strange surroundings. I thought in a little while, we would be sitting somewhere quiet and less ostentatious, spilling our hearts out.

  Moreover, the guard who stood outside the entrance door, and whose shadow I could see through the top half of the panelling, was tapping on the glass to say our time was up.

  There was a host of cousins waiting for us, some that I remembered and some that I did not. They were all dressed up but one seemed to be the ringleader, ordering the others where to stand, et cetera. She was introduced to me as Auntie, but she was not my aunt. I barely remembered her. She was the most famous cousin we had. We went to her house very seldom because we were poorer. She had married an army officer who got promoted to general and then moved away. It was said that he left her but they were still officially married. In her house the walls were crammed with photographs of the general in his army uniform and his medals and sometimes Auntie yoked to him in one of her shiny dresses and looped necklaces. There were also families of dolls on window ledges, with their legs spread out. China dolls with painted cheeks and pigskin boots.

  A nurse followed soon after with Babby in her arms and I sensed a certain chill as they recoiled. Not one of them rushed forward to admire her.

  ‘She has the same little frown in the centre of her forehead as you,’ I said to Mama, and they all looked at me with revulsion.

  Auntie began to explain to me that the government did not approve of bush wives bringing back their children, but instead found crèches for them to live in. I felt so hurt at being called a bush wife, and not by my name. She said that in my case an exception had been made because she pulled strings. She made sure that the baby would be brought back to our own village. Mama told me to thank her. She was beaming with pride. Auntie said they would leave that afternoon as the city was far too jangly and far too unhealthy for a sick child. I knew I was being deceived but I was unable to challenge them. The last I saw was Babby being held by a nurse, swaddled in a clean white shawl, the crown of her head concealed in it. She had a green soother in her mouth, with a row of beads dangling from it so that she could suck and play with the beads at the same time. She did not fret at being separated from me. She was enthralled by her new surroundings, staring, pointing at things, then gazing up at the lit chandeliers that poured pools of light onto the marbled floor and picked up chinks of colour in maroon and pink and ochre.

  IT WAS A FEVERISH DAY. Crowds. Speeches. And veneration.

  I had been given a new purple dress with a purple lining to hide the ghastly gore within and also a matching veil. Mama had a flowered dress with wisps of gold that hung from the seams and trembled when she moved. Her hair was perfectly braided, in a salon where they also bathed her feet in a basin of whirling water. She was still cold with me, and far friendlier to those around her who were praising her courage and her faith.

  An aide kept reminding me to smile, so I smiled. She had also briefed me on what to say and what to withhold. People did not wish to hear gruesome stories. ‘Nothing negative … nothing negative,’ she kept whispering in my ear.

  We were driven to the President’s residence early so as t
o avoid the crowds and any intrusion from press or cameras. When we got there we were led directly to our seats. A carpet of the same intricate design led from the hallway into the reception room, where the flags of the neighbouring states were furled on poles, inside the bay of the window. Pink curtains were drawn to shut out the glare of the sun. Chairs were placed on either side of the central aisle and different chairs at the very top in a semicircle where the President and his entourage would sit. They were covered in a peach-coloured satin and there was not a stain on them. Everything was perfect, the chalk-white mouldings of the ceiling, the shining wooden columns, the exact folding of the curtains and yet it felt cheerless. I smelt flowers but there were none. I reckoned that the room had been sprayed earlier to give a semblance of nature. We sat stiffly. I could hear Mama’s gigantic sighs. Maybe her dress was too tight. An urge overcame me to slip away to wherever Babby was. I felt she needed me.

  Mothers who had been invited were arriving in batches, the dust of their journey on their feet and on their ragged clothing. They recognised me at once. Their eyes settled on me and I saw those craven expressions, all reaching for news of their own. How could I tell them the truth, that some girls had died in childbirth, others in different bombardments, some sent to more remote camps, and most bafflingly of all, some had chosen to stay in the camp, where they were thankful to have at least one meal a day.

  Nothing negative … nothing negative … was spinning through my mind.

  There was a fanfare as the President and his entourage were announced. It was a cavalcade of government ministers, their aides and military men with badges and medals emblazoned on their chests. The ministers wore richly embroidered hulas, and the President himself, the tallest among them, wore a chaste white one with a wide gold band. He was like a man in a sphere of his own. The women were too afraid to clap loudly and almost too afraid to breathe. Instead, they craned forward to be that bit nearer to him. A woman in a blue dress took her time to sit comfortably and then gathered the folds of silk around her ankles coquettishly, all the time smiling.