by Wole Soyinka
Half a mile from the scene of the siege he abandoned the car and began to creep through the bushes. Without formally thinking out his next plan of action he had decided that it was best to reconnoitre. He picked his way carefully through the unfamiliar terrain, freezing in terror at every unfamiliar sound. He came on the spot unexpectedly.
The charnel house rose stark against the dark sky, gaunt, taller than its daylight intact reality. It blotted out the landscape, dwarfed and eliminated all other objects within sight—trees, bushes or neighbouring houses. His mind was already attuned to disaster but even so it was difficult for him to accept this actuality. Not for a moment did he doubt that by some freak combination of events both Ofeyi and the doctor had been engulfed within the holocaust. The gutted walls, the total, self-contained tottering horror was a conclusive shadow in the dark. An uninviting hole gaped through a side-wall leading into some unspeakable hell within. He skirted the house, keeping well within the bushes.
Then he saw his first sign of a casualty, a human limb charred and torn from the shoulder, blasted through a hole in the wall. It was caught and wedged in a cleft of a low cashew branch, a macabre joke fired from a circus spectacle. A few books lay scattered on the lawn. Glass splinters and bottle-necks everywhere, the relics of many semi-dozen nights of that strange character Mr. Semi-dozen.
There was no motion anywhere. Clearly there were no survivors. Zaccheus moved forward, gradually throwing all caution aside. He commenced his search through drunkenly swaying shelves, shattered porcelain, pushed his way through a table which was wedged tightly in a doorway. He began to wonder when a wall might collapse on him. It hardly mattered. A body lay beside a wardrobe, it seemed to have passed through a shredding machine, so neatly was the flesh severed by a thousand splinters of glass. A reek of cordite stung his nostrils. Suddenly he wondered if there were unexploded charges lying about. One false step…still no sign of the fat suicidal creature or of the two rescuers. It was the glass which was most in evidence, as if a powerful tornado had whirled through a glass-house forcing shrapnel at high pressure through every object and embedding them in walls, ceilings, and human bodies.
And then he saw a survivor. The man had half-crawled outwards through a hole in the bathroom door. Both his legs were shattered and a huge raw welt covered one side of his face. He could hardly see. But he had heard the sound of Zaccheus’ movements and his hands were raised in a pleading gesture in his direction. Zaccheus stood a long time and watched the man, his feelings strangely numbed and untouched. He watched the man’s strength dwindle slowly from his efforts until he collapsed again face downwards. Zaccheus wondered if he was dead. Then he heard him raise his head again and attempt to resume his outward crawl.
Suddenly Zaccheus was galvanized into further action. He raced through the house now, looking briefly at the bodies, lifting falling masonry and shattered furniture to find quick clues to recognition of the bodies that lay beneath. Satisfied, experiencing uncertain relief that neither Chalil nor Ofeyi lay within the centre of the holocaust nor in the immediate periphery he returned to the injured man as to the major problem of the night. Only then did it occur to him to wonder if his erstwhile companions were safely back at the house.
Zaccheus stood beside the wounded man, marvelling at this strange, prolonged blockage in his mind. It seemed unreal, that he had actually needlessly exposed himself to the hundred inherent dangers of burrowing through the charnel-house! His mind explored again the fears he had felt of other murderers still lurking in the vicinity of the blast and he shivered violently. It seemed beyond him, in fact he considered it the most marvellous part of his own participation in the night’s events. Hauling the wounded man over his shoulder, he moved towards the house.
In the lounge Mr. Nnodi staggered up uncertainly and turned to the doctor. “Can I lie down on your couch? I want to sleep. I want to sleep for a whole week. I have not once shut my eyes in four days, waiting for those murderers to call on me.”
“Come upstairs. There is a spare guest-room.”
Zaccheus tried the back-door at that moment and all movement stopped. Ofeyi leapt for the shotgun and moved towards the window. Nnodi was instantly transformed, looked wildly around for a weapon, then grabbed the other gun for which he had made Chalil return at the moment of rescue. Ofeyi switched off the light. Zaccheus knocked again. But now he was terrified to announce his identity, the sudden dowsing of the light had raised new possibilities in his mind. It could quite easily be that survivors of the raiding party now occupied the house. He stood in utter confusion unable to think clearly any more.
Then Chalil switched on the rear porch light barking aloud at the same time: “Who is it?” Trembling both from the sudden exposure under the aggressive light as much as from relief Zaccheus announced himself. As the door was opened, his much weakened knees gave and he fell in with the wounded man, both covered in blood.
“Zaccheus! What has happened to you?” Apprehension in both men had flown to the fate of the women.
“I’m all right, I’m all right. The blood is from this wounded man.”
Only then did they enquire about the women. The Asian bent down swiftly and began to examine the man’s wounds. Zaccheus narrated his adventures.
It was Ofeyi who first noticed the change in the big man. There came the moment when it penetrated Nnodi’s mind that the wounded man now being tended by Dr. Ramath was none other than one of his would-be murderers. He seized his gun again but Ofeyi beat him to it. In the struggle the gun went off, blasting off two of the dancing arms of Shiva and knocking off a picture-frame from the wall. There followed the struggle of the three men to overpower him as he next went for the throat of the wounded man. With maniacal strength he threw them off again and again, rolling-eyed and dribbling saliva from his mouth corners. His intended victim, blinded still by blood called continuously on heaven’s protection, shivering in every limb. Finally Nnodi’s strength appeared to slacken. He began, strangely enough to commence an attempt to struggle free towards the window. Ofeyi sensed the change and looked quickly to see if another weapon lay on the sill. There was none. Nnodi tried to speak, tried to indicate an urgent need but a huge obstruction lay in his throat. Suddenly he was violently sick.
Ofeyi led him towards the lavatory before the next convulsion began. The doctor moved towards his bag and laid out a syringe. Zaccheus gave up all further effort to comprehend it all, slumped from exhaustion into a chair.
XIII
A bold painted cross across a church steeple did not seem a likely prospect. Camouflage was far more likely for such areas of sanctuary. Yet where the steeple, obviously a recent addition, merged with the main body of the church, a wide arch blazed forth in loud red letters the legend TABERNACLE OF HOPE.
“Hope!” Ofeyi muttered. Taiila placed her hand on his lap and said, “Don’t give up.”
They left the car and walked towards the enclosure. Inside the gate someone had left a bundle of rags and a staff. Ofeyi looked around hoping for some sign of the owner. They moved on to the back of the church and Taiila, still looking over her shoulder clutched at Ofeyi’s arm. Only to relax again.
“Oh, I’m sorry. I must be more scared than I thought.”
“Not half as scared as I am don’t you worry…”
“Look! It moved again. The heap of rags!”
Zaccheus whistled. “Yah. That thing we’ve just passed. I saw it too.”
They watched it for some moments but it betrayed no further motion. Ofeyi shook his head. “I think you’re both seeing things. I’ve been hearing things too.”
“Hearing? You mean like a kind of low humming?”
Ofeyi nodded. “So you heard it too.”
“Look boss, I don’t believe in spooks but this place is spooky.”
Taiila had never taken her eyes off the rags. “It could have been the wind” she said.
&n
bsp; “Everything is too still. Everything is uncannily still.”
They were quiet for a long while. Strain as they would, they could no longer hear even the former low monotone that seemed to seep from the bowels of earth.
Zaccheus fidgeted. “Let’s get going. There is nothing here. We must have come to the wrong place.”
Ofeyi moved forward. “No, there must be someone. I’ll try a window round the back.”
“Careful” Taiila cautioned. “If there is someone and he’s scared he might attack you.”
He moved round the back but came first to a door which looked as if it belonged to a vestry. He knocked softly. No reply. He next attacked the window, pulling back the bottom edge a little to provide a slit. All was dark within. Then as he straightened up he was certain that he had heard movements. He spun round to the distinct noise of a key turning in the lock of the door he had just passed. It opened a crack and a figure emerged fully to confront him. He wore a simple black cassock, frayed and discoloured. Ofeyi’s quick glance took in his thin features that looked almost foreign, even to his near-light skin and downy hair. A nomad type from Cross-river.
“Do you need help?” the man asked. “My name is Elihu. I am the catechist here.”
Taiila and Zaccheus coming up just then rescued Ofeyi from a momentary confusion. Zaccheus wished him a good morning and the catechist shook hands all round. Taiila explained their mission.
Ofeyi added, “Perhaps you know Lieutenant Sayi of the Air Force. He suggested we look in a few chapels like this. If she’s not here perhaps you can direct us to others.”
The name appeared to achieve the desired effect. The catechist nodded. “You had better come in and wait in the vestry. I shall make enquiries.”
The bare room contained only one chair. “We have no furniture as you can see. Perhaps the lady can take the chair and you two gentlemen…”
“We are all right standing” Ofeyi assured him.
The man hesitated a while. His eyes were fixed on Taiila and he seemed to want to say something. Finally he smiled a little, the tenseness and work-burden that appeared to have knitted together the corners of his eyes dissolved. “You are a very beautiful lady” he said.
Surprised but pleased, Taiila thanked him but he continued, “Not just beautiful but full of light.” He glanced round the dank room. “This room feels radiant, it must be your presence.”
He turned to go, hesitated again at the door, and faced them again. “I wonder if…you would like to come yourselves. I could make the enquiry and let you know. But, perhaps I clutch at every straw…only I think that the sight of visitors might bring some cheer into the gloom.”
Taiila sprang up at once. “Of course we’ll come if you think it will help.”
He shook his head. “Nothing of light or beauty has touched their lives here for some time. But come and see for yourself. Please mind your head. It is much better to crouch.”
He opened a door and they were struck blind or else had moved into thick impenetrable darkness. But sounds came. And Ofeyi recognized the low murmuring he had heard before, the low resonance of hushed human activity and intimacy. There was a child’s whisper. A heavy wooden object, probably a bench scraped the floor. A suction of bare feet.
Their eyes had not yet adjusted but they felt their guide stop at some obstacle and tap on it. They recognized then that they were in some kind of ante-room, a low rectangular box, a huge packing-case muffled and padded. Ofeyi felt along the sides, it was clearly wooden and seemed carved with unusual designs. He raised his head slightly and it came in contact with the roof at, he estimated, no higher than five feet. When a door opened in response to the priest’s knock he realized that they were in fact entering the body of the church through the belly of the altar. The “door” was itself a solid barricade pulled aside by invisible hands. The sounds from within swelled to a rhythmic language of hives. As they emerged into a slight lessening of the dark the priest said to them,
“You will have to pick your feet one by one.”
Their hands, feet, brushed against human textures, warm contours. Bodies they could not yet completely see yielded them passage. They waded carefully through a low dense thicket of limbs keeping an eye on the pale neck of the guide, watching the whites of eyes spring forth and fill the thicket like a swarm of glow-worms. A hundred eyes swept round towards them, flared brightly for a while then dimmed inwards into the dark. Ofeyi imagined an instinctive fear, hope, defiance in each eye-flare in the dark. Then there were those which seemed more like tiny moths; they fluttered blankly, expressionless. Ofeyi concluded that they were the children’s.
Then they heard singing. Their passage ceased to usurp the feel of invisible graves lined with prone bodies for burial. From beyond the feel of upturned feet, from the further dark-massed corner of the temple voices fanned out towards them, deep, close and self-absorbed. Low though it was and cautious it formed a generous protective shawl denying fear or despair. One heard the watchfulness in it, the soft breathing of a dog that would cease abruptly at any alien sound, and sift it for menace.
Some light had been permitted in through narrow fanlights. Pale beams cut across the room parallel to the floor but remained high above it, so that walking upright their heads floated on the beams, disembodied. Ceiling and rafters began but vanished into the upper darkness, a brief portion of the walls floated in the surreal haze, a few crude paintings of cherubs and angels and their extravagant haloes. The rest, peopled by the prone, squatting, dragging, whispering figures was a low long crypt roofed by pale mote-riddled beams of light.
Taiila whispered, awe-struck, “It feels like a subterranean camp!”
A leg dragged inwards just before them, a hand lifted languidly and fell back again. Again and again they saw their guide bend downwards, his hand deliver a pat or a caress. Once he rose with a child in his hands. They stopped while he stuck a finger under the child’s nose and wobbled it in play. The child remained strangely silent, responding not even with the ghost of a smile much less a chuckle. He replaced it into waiting hands and they moved on, pursued then ignored by an eloquence of eyes.
At a concrete hexagon covered by a wooden board he stopped at last. The baptismal font was now a cauldron for food. It appeared to be feeding-time. A ladle dipped into the font, emerged with some form of stew, tipped itself into a bowl and vanished into waiting hands. They watched the bowl float from hand to hand all down the line and it occurred to Ofeyi for the first time that its contents were hot. Anticipating their amazement the priest explained.
“One of the men is an electrician. He rigged up the element in a cooker against the base of the font. We manage to have a hot meal at least once a day.”
The sleeping forms were sitting up one after the other, the children betrayed animation. Cries followed, rebukes and soothing noises. With eyes that were now fully accustomed to the light the visitors began to make out a multitude of heads and arms. Patches of cloth grew light retentive. Objects stood out which had served till now for pillows. Portmanteaus, cloth bags, cardboard cartons, a radio, the cover of a sewing-machine but mostly bundles of the soft doughy testaments of the suddenness of catastrophe and flight, squashed for cushions and back-rests. In the slow-motion darkness these bundles appeared to pulse with the stubborn resilient yeast of life. Enamel, aluminium, clay or tin, the bowls that passed among limbs and heads dispensed the same warm essence of survival and Ofeyi found himself absorbing some of its stubborn hope.
The priest’s eyes continued to search even as he spoke to the server at the font. She pointed with her ladle and they moved towards a further wing of darkness, in the direction in which the singing had begun. The dark here was a mere grey mist, pierced in a hundred places by fuzzed beams from slats high up in the tower. Breasts hung out from blouses and babies sucked noisily. A few figures swathed in heavily stained bandages lay unmoving. Heads lolled
against pews which for the first time they could now see clearly. There were old people stretched out on these pews, some strained to read a few lines of the bible in the poor light. It was they also, the old ones, who broke into hymns from time to time, singing in hushed age-seasoned tones. A low murmur rose from a pair who sat side by side in the pew, prayer books in their hands but staring straight before them, intoning over and over…the Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. He leadeth me in green pastures. Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death…
“Father!”
They turned. A face risen from the grey sea approached them. Striated by beams it worked pain-strictured lips to bring out words. The priest placed his hand on his shoulder.
“What is it Michael? Is she worse?”
“I think she is dying Father.”
The priest pushed past him and disappeared into the grey fog. A moment later the others had caught up with him. Taiila knelt beside a form lying on its side, knees drawn up against the chest. One side of her face was hidden under a huge wad of cotton, held in place by a string across her head. Her breaths came now with difficulty. Taiila lifted the head and placed it on her knees and the woman began to give up the struggle against death.
Ofeyi found himself face to face with a broken figure of anguish, a face contorted and giving slowly along the grain. The words struggled out from strangulation. “They are all dead. All of them. My sister, all our children. She is all that is left. If she goes I have nothing more, nothing…I should have died. They left us for dead, I should have died….”