Behind the Eclipse

by Pramudith D. Rupasinghe

  ‘Kumba!’ It was loud enough to take her attention.

  18

  ‘Kumba you are alive?’

  ‘Kumba you are alive?’

  ‘You are alive?’

  ‘Alive?’

  I could not take my eyes off her, and I walked towards her asking over and over again if she was alive.

  It was just like an illusion, and I could not believe my eyes. I simply could not believe she was in front of my eyes.

  ‘You survived the Bush-curse?’ I could remember asking her.

  I could recollect that she slightly smiled at me with a feared face, but she did not talk. There was silence for a few seconds that I felt retained for over a century.

  ‘Kumba,’ I said again.

  ‘Yes, I escaped the Bush-curse,’ her voice came live. It was the same voice that I heard whenever I visited her. A voice full of hesitation and incertitude which I adored. Just like rising from death, every single event down the memory lane started to come back to my mind as if I was watching my past in a film. The time I was dreaming about her; the moment I caught her near the river; every single time I saw her whenever my father was not around, and the day she was sick, all of those memories became vivid within my eyes. I desperately wanted to touch her and hold her tight to feel if she was almost the same person whom I was in search of, and whose warmth I had been missing for decades. But the crowd, my position and the presence of the pastors had barricaded not only my actions but also my words. But my feelings and thoughts were enraging against the limits imposed on me. I felt like a prisoner of God. The old brick wall of the half-built church appeared like a cage where the pastors were the guards.

  I felt that, in the flames of human desires and feelings, the love of God could get burnt into ashes and get taken away by the blowing wind of an unknown urge. I touched her shoulder with publicly manifested kindness and sympathy with a latently boiling feeling and some love that I did not bother to explore. The moment my hand touched her shoulder that I had been stroking all night those days, she lifted her head and looked at me as if she did not want me to touch her again. Instead of those lust- filled eyes, there were signs of helplessness and suffering. Her face was a living evidence of toughness of the life she had been living. Some bruises on her neck reminded me of my uncle who used to torture his first wife which Oldman always criticised. My hand that was manacled by religious discipline could not resist the human feeling of wanting to touch her neck full of bruises.

  ‘What happened to you?’ She did not respond to me. Instead, she slowly adjusted a safer distance from me.

  ‘You have a man?’ I could not but ask her.

  ‘Yes,’ her reply was short but loud and clear.

  ‘How many children?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said

  ‘Four,’ she added.

  ‘Boys?’ Two boys two girls,’ she replied caressing the head of the little boy who was next to her.

  ‘Your man,’

  ‘He here,’ she replied showing a well-built man who looked like a Mandingo.

  ‘I go now,’ I said all of a sudden, noticing her man coming back towards her with two little girls whom I assumed their other kids.

  ‘Life never remains constant.’ Oldman was right. I felt.

  She turned back and joined her man and kids. Her fleshy hips were swinging as she walked away. I felt that I had lost more than what I had gained. Life was just like a year in Kissi village. You could have the dry season and wet season.

  ‘George!’ I was startled hearing someone calling by my name. When I turned, it was the Pastor Jean-Paul.

  ‘We will leave now for Macenta for some days. After Jean-Claude and Patrick leave, I will be back.’ His words sounded promising.

  ‘My life is in the hands of God,’ I said.

  ‘C`eat vrai,’ he said. That means it was true. I smiled in agreement as if I meant the same.

  The pastors left the church in the afternoon, and I was alone in the room. The huge cross hanging over my head used to be a reminder of the selflessness of Jesus Christ for the truth he believed in and the love for the people. But when I noticed the cross while I was entering the room, I felt as if I was crucified. I took the piece of wood that we used for beating the serpents creeping into the rooms and brought that cross down. Then I saw the photo of Jesus Christ already crucified and still with his open arms looking at me. Was it me who was waiting for Kumba to come to me? I felt the weight of that cross which was on his back. I went to the little table that stood where the photo was and turned the photo back so that nothing binding would be there to interrupt Kumba and me. In a world which had a constant history of my childhood, I wanted to be alone and to live in the memories that the past had engraved in my mind and to wander along the path of fantasies, stored in the uncertainty of the unborn future.

  The most urging element in life could not be your so-called intellect or intelligence but desires and feelings. They decide birth, survival, and death. The beginning of everything else and their end are determined by human feelings just like the wind that takes the flowers for pollination.

  It was a few hours after midday. The sun was still bright. I came out of the room and decided to walk along the pathway towards the refugee camps. An irresistible urge was obsessing me to locate the place where Kumba lived. I walked through the camps till the end and started coming back because I did not notice anything that hinted about her presence in the camp. All of a sudden, a familiar face of a child posed up out of a small hut and greeted me as if he knew me well. I had not forgotten the red colour dirty short and mother-like face. I smiled at the boy and greeted him back. As he came towards me, I stopped to talk to him. His little flat nose, fat lips and swelled eye beds could not stop me imagining the face of Kumba when she first came to Oldman. Her soft flesh in round cheeks and short fingers in tiny hands had been gifted to the boy without any shortage. I had ten United-States dollar note with me which I gave him and asked him to give it to his mother.

  I returned to the church for the evening service. Since there was a full service in the morning with the foreign pastors, only a few had come to the evening service. Therefore, I briefly conducted it and locked myself up in the room. Whenever I tried to sleep, Kumba` appeared inside my closed eyes and woke me up. I reflected on the nights I spent when she was sick before she lost her belly*. I felt almost the same but, instead of the fear of losing, I felt an urge to see her.

  I could barely prepare for the morning service as I was lost in pensiveness the whole night. But I did not forget to put on the best dress to go to the morning service. With my shiny black shoes with pointed toes, white long sleeve shirt with a bow on and black trousers with a black leather belt around the waistline, I walked under the tamarind tree where the service was conducted. I expected to see Kumba in the service. I started with the universal love of God; a theme that could at least allow me to talk about the love of any sort. But what my eyes were searching for was not in the crowd. After finishing the service with unsure thoughts, I walked along the pathway towards the refugee camps. The fact that she did not tell anything about my sending her money and food with the boy and her absence in the service obsessed me to the extent that I was desperately in need of being there right away.

  When I reached the tent from where the boy popped up, Kumba was soaking a piece of dried meat in a plastic bucket. Seeing me coming towards her, she stood just like an antelope that rose from a deep slumber hearing a roar or a leopard; feared and shaking.

  ‘God bless you!’ I said.

  She remained silent and threw a look from my head to toe.

  ‘You are …,’ I left my question for her to reply.

  ‘I am married to a Mandingo man from Sierra Leone,’ she said which allowed me to probe into her belief.

  ‘You are Islam?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said even before I finished asking my questi
on.

  ‘I came with the crowd as they told some white men had come with food.’ She quickly justified her presence in the service the other day.

  We used to worship the same Creator and seek miraculous help from our ancestors. But now two different Gods had already dragged us in two separate paths. A sigh was released into the dusty air which was the home of both Gods we talked and believed in. I could not believe how strongly the damage made to traditional belief system had come to a level that had already created barriers between human relationships. I did not know what to say. I just greeted her and turned back to walk away.

  ‘Tamba!’ Her voice twisted my neck in less than a second.

  I turned towards her without my knowledge. It was the same voice, though a little older than it used to be; I heard it when I was looking into her sparkling round eyes through the moonlight that used to creep in her hut.

  ‘Tamba!’ the words of Kumba surmounted ‘You are reborn as George!’ the words of the Reverend Maurice. It was a moment when inheritance dominated over the acquired or the imposed. A moment that was recaptured by the Creator and ancestors from the invader called white man`s God. George was known to me, but Tamba was myself. Tamba was free and happy whereas George was tied up and unhappy. I looked at Kumba who was looking at me with her usual innocent face even though it had enough signs of her age and motherhood which added mature appeal.

  I sat on a log near the hut expecting her to sit by me. My burning desires and feelings had already been transformed into a boiling urge to know about what happened during the last decade.

  ‘You like dried meat, I know,’ she said smiling and went into the hut. Even though my thoughts followed her into her dark little hut, my body was tightened up by the church, people who were around and the children who were playing in front of the hut. I watched how she walked in. There wasn’t a single sign of age to be noticed from behind.

  In a while, she returned with a piece of dried bush meat soaked in water. After a long time, I was left with my favourite food and favourite woman for a moment to discover an unknown journey that each one of us had made during the last decade.

  ‘After the death of Saa…’ she started.

  ‘My father died?’ I knew he would not survive, but hearing that he was dead, I felt a sudden current of anguish rushing through my nerves and quickly turned into a feeling of sorrow which jumped out of my eyes. I cried within more than what Kumba could see in my eyes.

  ‘He should be having eternal peace with mighty Allah ... In the paradise,’ she said with an empathetic look and continued.

  ‘Grandmother and your mother fell sick, and many others followed including children of uncle and a few other families. All of them got the Bush-curse, they fell ill, started shivering, their skin got rashes, blood came out from everywhere, and they finally died. Many others might have died too, but I escaped to the bush where one Guinean man who came to treat our villagers said that the only remedy was to abandon those who were sick, leave enough water and food around them, and keep waiting for one full moon outside the village. And in case anyone fell sick again, abandon them and finally escape from the area. The fox and the monitors would know what to do with the remaining. I escaped with this small boy who had already been in my belly.’

  She sighed either with relief or to relieve herself, but my heart had become heavier than it used to be when I was leaving the church.

  ‘We went to Robert`s port where Muhammad had his family. We lived there till the rebels of Charles Taylor came. They looted all that we had including chicken; raped women and children, forcefully recruited girls and boys to their groups and killed everyone who stood in their way. We escaped with nothing in our hands just the lives of four of us.’ She fell silent.

  ‘I will come back,’ I said even though my dry mouth did not emit sound to an audible extent. I stood up as I felt I had not gone through that much. Involuntarily, my right hand was on her shoulders, and I felt her fluffy cheeks and sponge-like shaggy hair that I used to admire those days all through the nights, and I felt hot tears running along my hand.

  ‘I will come back,’ I repeated as I was gently taking my hands off her shoulder and turned back before the festered sorrows from the already aching heart could break the barricades of so-called African maleness and pour down my cheeks. I walked up to the end of the path passing dozens of temporary shelters and could not resist my urge to look back. The moment I turned my head, I saw Kumba still at the other end of the path looking at me; far enough to remain untouched, close enough to see.

  I reached the church with mixed feelings. Knowing exactly what happened to my family was, in a way, a consolation for me. At the same time, learning well that my parents had passed away and not being able to execute my social and spiritual responsibilities in helping them join the ancestors made me sad. Finding the woman whom I was attracted to, talking to her and getting to know what happened to her in the past decade gave some rays of light in the darkness in which I lived more than a decade. But, witnessing that she was living with another man, even though we were still attracted to each other, was simply heart wrecking.

  I opened my room because I wanted a rest rather a mental rest than a physical rest. The very first thing I noticed was a messed bed and the cross that I had brought down in the morning. I went unto the cross, held it close to my chest and then hung it where it was. Then I went to the table and turned the photo of Jesus Christ that was carelessly placed on the table.

  Kumba prayed for mighty Allah. I prayed to God, and my parents prayed for the Creator and our ancestors. Same blood would run in our veins, and same empty air would echo our prayers though we prayed for different unseen powers. As the white man said once, I did not want to question anything anymore. We all prayed for good whoever Gods we prayed for. I knelt down before the photo of Jesus and prayed as much as I could. I prayed for my parents, prayed for Kumba and prayed for me.

  19

  It looked like that the symphony of the Pepper bird that used to be my morning alarm, was no longer melodious to me. I wondered why the sun had unfolded another day. The maiden sun rays that kissed the grassland wet with fresh dew were no longer my energizer for the day. I woke up cursing the fact that I was alive. I was a survivor in many ways: a survivor who had witnessed the death and parting of loved ones. My parents and many others who were close to me had added their last breath to the empty air and left me alone in this harsh earth enjoying the glory of the life with ancestors. A sudden spell of anger not only towards those who died leaving me behind but also towards myself burnt down my inner peace. If I had gone too, I would not have witnessed the woman I loved living with a stranger from another tribe across the Liberian borders. Not only Kumba who provoked my anger but also the surviving without having a chance to plunge in the good old sensations triggered a blistering anger in me.

  Sadness, anger, and misery were not new things in my life. Sadness was a constant follower in my journey of life since the day I began to know my feelings. Anger had never turned out to be my own enemy in the past that I could recall. Misery used to peep through the bush from time to time, but all of them were just like darkness which came at night, and I knew that there would be light followed by each day’s sunrise after every dark night. Happiness and hope used to follow sorrow and misery just like maiden sun rays that penetrated the darkness.

  ‘Life is an obit where light and darkness follow each other in a mercurial cycle, just like night is followed by a day and every day is followed by a night,’ the Reverend Philip told one young woman called Fatimata in Monrovia during the funeral service of her husband. His words were therapeutic whenever I felt sad or helpless.

  Since no one else was in the church, I had to prepare for the service. I made my morning coffee with honey which I acquired from the Reverend Maurice who loved Brazilian coffee and African bee honey.

  ‘This keeps me awake.’ He used to say when he was b
lowing air to make the fire to boil water every morning. And then he took the old glass bottle full of honey and poured a little into his coffee mug.

  ‘Drink this. Coffee is a reminder that night is over. You need to work, and honey gives the energy to work.’ He made me drink a cup of coffee that I found a combination of bitterness and sweetness when I tasted it first, but later on, I developed the same habit of drinking coffee with honey every morning.

  Once I finished my coffee, I walked out and bought two boiled eggs from the boy who came every morning to sell boiled eggs. It was my simple and nutritious breakfast. Next activity in my daily life was my only and main responsibility of life which was to serve God. Under the tamarind tree, the crowd had already gathered even before I stepped out of my room. That used to be usual every morning. I walked out to start my usual service. My eyes did not search for Kumba this time because I already knew she did not belong to God but to Allah.

  ‘Taylor has been elected as president,’ one among the devotees broke the silence. It was so as to prove that any species could respond to the stimuli from their own species. The crowd that had gathered for hearing the words of God became agitated and restless just like the ocean. Then a sudden roar quaked the surrounding. It looked like people were already excited to go back to Liberia even though peace was not still guaranteed.

  ‘There will be peace,’ one among the crowd already predicted.

  ‘Johnson will make troubles,’ another said.

  I realised that there was no space for the words of God in an environment where hope was dominant over the misery and happiness at its orgasm. I gave up the idea of delivering the service and joined the celebration.

  People danced around the church building that was partially built. I felt that a dark time had come to an end. But I was not sure how long the light would remain just like the night that was broken by the day and so did the day.