All the Names They Used for God

by Anjali Sachdeva

  Still, we thought someone would come for us. There were stories—girls ransomed by their parents, negotiated for by the government. Even if we wouldn’t admit it to one another, we still had hope that there was a way out. And then, one night, we woke to hear the men shouting. There were torches moving in the darkness, the sound of gunfire. The next thing I knew, I was being pulled to my feet, dragged out of the tent where we slept. Abike was beside me, and I saw her grabbed by another man, his arm around her throat, a gun in his free hand. The men looked crazed; they were yelling and cursing at us to move faster, and all around girls were crying and asking what was going on. The men half pushed, half dragged us to the edge of camp, and there I saw what I had been wanting to see for the past four months: a line of soldiers in government uniforms, their guns pointed at the camp, shouting at the men who held us to drop their weapons. Except the men did not listen, and you could see that the government soldiers were panicked. The man holding me began to fire at the soldiers, his arm like a bar across my throat, holding me in front of him, and I struggled but could not get loose. In front of me the soldiers were dying, their chests and heads bursting, and soon any that were left turned and retreated, and the men in the camp shouted after them, triumphant. At last, the man holding me let me go.

  It had probably been only five minutes since I was asleep, but I felt as if the shooting had been going on all night. I was half-deaf from the gunfire and I fell to the ground crying, trying to get my breath back, but the man who had held me pushed me with the toe of his boot and said, “Start moving those bodies. There. Pile them together.” So I did. Because I knew they would not hesitate to kill anyone who displeased them that night. Abike and I worked together, grabbing legs, arms, dragging the bodies to the pile. One of them wasn’t even dead, though he was bleeding plenty. He watched us and said nothing, his eyes moving slowly in his face. Probably he was hoping the same thing we had always hoped: that if he just stayed quiet, they would overlook him, and he would find a way out. But it was dawn, and all around us the forest was getting lighter. We knew in the morning the men would set the bodies on fire.

  At last, they let us rest. I sat on the ground, my head against my knees, and Abike sat a little distance off. We couldn’t even look at each other. My hands and arms were sticky with blood, my clothes soaked with it. The flies would not leave me be, but I was too tired to chase them away. Someone sat next to me and I lifted my head long enough to see that it was one of the men, the one named Karim. I knew I shouldn’t disrespect him by ignoring him, but in that moment I didn’t care; even if I died for it, all I wanted was to be left alone. I could hear him breathing, under the buzz of the flies. Then he put his hand on the back of my head. “Promise,” he said.

  They didn’t often call us by our names. I hadn’t even realized he knew my name. He patted my head in a way I imagine was supposed to be comforting, but it made me feel unclean to have him touching me at all. I flicked my eyes up past the tops of my knees and I could see Abike, watching us but not directly, her whole body tense.

  “Did you not have any Muslim friends in your village?” he said to me.

  I nodded, barely moving my head. It seemed like a trick question. They never asked us about our villages. In fact, my best friend had been a Muslim girl named Fatima. She was as shy as a dormouse, but we always understood each other. Sometimes on Saturdays we would ride in the back of my uncle’s truck to the nearest town and walk through the market together holding hands, and half a day would pass where we would not say anything and be perfectly content.

  Karim moved closer, and looked at me earnestly. “Then you know what life you could have,” he said. “You’re upset, but if we hadn’t killed those soldiers, do you know what they would have done? They would have killed all of us, and taken you back to your village.”

  Yes, I thought. In that moment, I could imagine my village more clearly than I had in months: the smell of the incense in church, the passing breeze of the fan as I sat behind my desk at school, the taste of Abike’s lipstick when she let me borrow it, of akara straight from my mother’s frying pan. Yes, they would have done that.

  “And then you would never have come to understand how great Allah is, and your soul would be lost. So these men had to die. Allah wouldn’t allow it to be any other way. Don’t cry.”

  I nodded my head again at this, but I hid my face in my knees and cried harder. Thinking about home, even for those few seconds, had torn apart some shell I had gathered around me over the months since our capture. Usually I didn’t let myself imagine it. It was only some place I had known in another life, and might see again if I lived long enough.

  A moment later Karim shoved me forward, so that I went sprawling onto my face. “You’re a stupid girl,” he said. “All of you, stupid girls. Your crying only shows how ungrateful you are.”

  After that, we stopped waiting for anyone to come for us.

  * * *

  —

  Several weeks after the government soldiers attacked, the men decided that our camp was too vulnerable; they split us up and took us to different towns. Before we left, most of us were married off, myself to Karim, Abike to Bashir, standing in the middle of camp while a man with a long white beard recited the same ceremony again and again.

  Do I even need to say that we were raped? The only question was whether you were raped before or after being married. The men thought they had been saints for waiting a few months to “reeducate” us before posing this question; this proved to them that they were not just bandits but true followers of Allah. If you refused to convert and be married—you could refuse—then you were an infidel whore and they could do as they liked with you. If you were married, then of course you could not refuse your husband, or couldn’t expect him to care if you did. It was a choice of being raped by one man or many, not a very difficult choice.

  I never saw most of the girls again, but Abike and I went to the same small village in Borno State. Our husbands were boyhood friends, our houses next door to each other. We frequently ate together, the four of us, Abike and I sitting silently while Bashir and Karim laughed and joked with each other.

  One day, Abike called me to her house to eat lunch with her. Our husbands liked this, when we did normal wifely things, inviting friends over for lunch. It made them feel like maybe we were normal wives, like we had chosen them, rather than being forced to marry them. They were eager to believe this. For their own sakes, they should have been more eager to see the truth: that we despised them.

  Bashir came into the room. “Husband,” Abike said, “please sit down with us.” He sat down and she smiled at him and looked into his eyes. She began tapping her hand on the table, gradually slowing her pace. At first I thought she was going to say something, but she didn’t, just kept staring at Bashir. Her hand was resting on the handle of the teakettle but she didn’t pour any tea. Her husband shifted in his seat, as though he had sat down on something that prickled, but then he was still again. After a long time, Abike said, “You should lie down on the bed and say the names of God a hundred times. Say them very slowly, and don’t miss any. Promise and I are going to sit outside.”

  Bashir blinked and nodded. He got up and walked to the bed and lay down facing the wall, and we heard him start to say the names of Allah. I just stared at him for a long time. I was so shocked I could barely breathe. I didn’t know any word for what she had done to him, but I could see that she had done it. “Come,” she said, and she led me to the door and out into the sunshine.

  * * *

  The young man who opens the door to my parents’ apartment raises his eyebrows at me and moves more solidly into the doorframe, as though he expects me to push past him. For a moment, I think I’ve got the wrong address. In the past four years, in the many letters and phone calls I’ve exchanged with her, my mother has asked me dozens of times to come home. I’ve made any number of excuses about why I couldn’t,
and now I wonder if, when I’ve finally worked up the courage, they’ve moved somewhere else and neglected to tell me.

  But over the man’s shoulder, I can see a table and on it a blue-and-pink bowl of fruit, the same bowl my mother has had my entire life. I look at the man again and realize this is my brother, George. The last time I saw him he was eleven years old, scrawny and missing a tooth. Now he is nineteen, heavily muscled in his arms and chest, wearing a Che Guevara T-shirt and knockoff designer jeans. He leans against the doorjamb and says, “You looking for my parents? They’re not home.”

  My hand flutters against my chest. “Promise. It’s Promise,” I say, though my throat is so tight I can barely speak.

  Still, he stares at me for a second before he says, “Oh. Oh, you?” He hugs me tightly, lets go again and takes my hand. “Come inside.”

  He walks into the room and there’s a carelessness in the way he moves, a looseness in the joints. I realize he’s drunk. He sits on the sofa and looks up at me without a trace of nerves, gestures vaguely at the other chairs in the room. I sit in one and he takes an orange from the bowl on the table and begins to peel it.

  “So, you decided to come and see us.”

  “I felt like it was time.” He nods as though this makes perfect sense, though it doesn’t, even to me. “Where are Mom and Dad?”

  “I don’t know, I was sleeping when they left. Probably just at the store or something. Want a drink?”

  “Sure.”

  He goes to the kitchen and comes back with two glasses, then to his bedroom for a bottle of Scotch. We clink glasses and throw the liquor back. I try to remember what I know about this grown-up George, what my mother has told me. He was supposed to be at the university this fall but couldn’t be for some reason. He’s been working somewhere instead—a restaurant? A copy shop? A week ago I could have told you, but right now my mind is blank. I don’t know what to make of this man, how to connect him to anything I know about my brother. Whatever I expected coming home to be like, it was not this, my brother watching me with nonchalant amusement while we get drunk in the middle of the day.

  Behind me there is muted conversation from the hallway, the click of the lock as the door opens. Before I can turn around, I hear my mother’s voice, sharp, saying, “George, I have told you for the last time, keep your dirty girls out of my house.” She walks quickly toward me and as I turn to face her, she is shoving a bag of groceries into my father’s arms. Whether she was planning to strike this “dirty girl” or just shove her into the hallway I never find out, because when she sees my face, she says, “Chei!” and claps her hand over her mouth. Her eyes fill with tears and instead of trying to embrace me, she staggers back a step, for which, I find, I am grateful. I don’t know how to put my arms around her; I need that little distance. I try to smile at her but I can’t, I only want to weep. I say, “Hello, Mama, hello, Dad,” and my father hugs me hard against his side with the groceries still cradled in one arm.

  * * *

  Without Abike’s help, I would never have been able to go home. She taught me what she knew, that way of controlling a man that I had no name for.

  “How did you learn it?” I said.

  “Do you know Onyeka, that woman who lives at the edge of the village?”

  I nodded. Onyeka was a prostitute. Not that anyone said it, but she walked through town with her head uncovered, wearing makeup, laughing too loud. She touched all the men in ways we wouldn’t dare. I often saw her in the market, but of course we were not supposed to talk to her.

  “She can do it,” Abike said. “She taught me. I thought she was just boasting. But it works. How else could she go around like she does in a place like this?”

  “But why were you talking to her anyway?” I said.

  Abike looked away. She nodded her head silently, as though replying to some other question I couldn’t hear. Finally, she said, “I went to ask her how to get rid of a baby. Anyway, I’ll teach you. How to do both.”

  So she tried to explain it to me. She said to start with simple things: make a man scratch his nose, or look away. Things he won’t question, things he might do anyway. But for months I felt nothing, like I was just staring at Karim, and worried all the time that he would ask me what the hell I thought I was looking at.

  “It’s like anything else,” Abike said. “You have to practice.”

  So I kept trying. And after a while, I began to understand. It felt like reaching out with your hands in a dark room, feeling for something you knew was there but could not see, except the room you were reaching into was another person. After a year, if I concentrated, I could sometimes persuade Karim that he wanted to go out instead of staying home, that he was too tired to touch me when he lay down next to me at night. If I said I wanted to visit with Abike, he didn’t object anymore, even if it was time for me to cook his supper or wash the clothes.

  Abike and I started to spend more time together, to take longer and longer walks around the village, but we got too bold. One day, we were sitting in the kitchen drinking our tea when the door slammed open and my husband walked in. Abike grasped my leg beneath the table, but her face remained calm. She smiled at him and welcomed him and asked if he would have some tea with us. He pushed past her into the back room where Bashir was lying in bed and said, “Bashir, get up.” Bashir didn’t move, just kept talking quietly to himself. Abike and I stood behind Karim, huddled together.

  “He’s praying, you shouldn’t disturb him. He tells me never to bother him when he is praying,” Abike said, but Karim shook Bashir roughly by the shoulder.

  “Get up!” he said. Then he turned and struck Abike hard across the face so that she fell to the floor. “You damned witch,” he said in English, and I thought, Yes, that is the word. That is what we are. He took me by the arm and shook me. “You, too? You think you’ll turn me mindless like you’ve done with him? This man is like a brother to me, and what have you bitches done to him?” He shook me harder. I screamed and wept but all the time I was thinking, Just look at me. Just look at my eyes for one moment and I’ll end this all. Abike didn’t make any sound and I was afraid for her; I wondered if he had killed her. He grabbed me by the chin and said, “Stop crying and answer me.”

  I looked at him, reached out into his eyes, deep, deep into him until I could feel the center of him, and what I found there I squeezed and crushed. I was too frightened to be subtle. He let go of me, but I leaned toward him, I kept his eyes. “Go sit on the bed with Bashir,” I said, and he staggered backward until he found the mattress. “Help him say the names of God.” I went back to Abike. She was sitting up now. She looked up at me and smiled and her front tooth was cracked.

  “We have to go,” I said.

  “We’re taking them with us,” she said. “You know what kind of evil they’ll get up to if we leave them alone.” She gathered all the money from my house and hers, and we took our husbands by the hands and walked out of the village.

  * * *

  —

  We went to a new town, a place where no one knew us and big enough that no one had time to care who we were. We got a house where we could live together, mobile phones, new clothes. I could have called my parents right then. I hadn’t spoken to them in three years and I knew they must wonder what had happened to me, even wonder if I was still alive.

  And I know what you’re thinking, what anyone would think: Why didn’t you run straight home? The truth was that we couldn’t bear to see anyone we knew, knowing the things we had done. We had killed babies and soldiers, had watched as girls wrapped themselves with bombs to go to the market where they would murder people like our mothers and fathers, and we did nothing to stop them. We had spat and screamed at the other girls in camp when they looked for comfort, had blasphemed, lied, spoken against everything we once believed in. We might have sold our own siblings to gain our freedom if someone had given us th
e chance. We had nights where we did not fight back the little bit we could have, where we did not even say, “Please, no,” and where we imagined a new life that went something like this: Go along, praise Allah, have clean clothes and enough to eat, raise some militant’s baby like any other woman raising a baby, forget about how it all started. When these things have never happened to you, you think, I would rather die. But the truth is that it is not so easy to decide to die. And when, suddenly, you have the option to live again, that is not so easy either.

  * * *

  When my parents are finished crying, my mother cooks supper for me, all the recipes I haven’t tasted since I was sixteen. I stand in the kitchen with her and chop vegetables while my father and George watch football in the next room. I know she doesn’t need my help, but I don’t know what to say to her and it feels good to have something to occupy my hands. As we work, she talks about George, raising her voice now and then when she wants to make sure he hears her.

  “He’s too busy for school,” she says. “Busy drinking and chasing girls. You remember, he was such a good boy, and what happened? He’s wasting his life.”

  “It’s mine to waste,” he says from the living room, and from the grim tone of his voice I can tell this is a fight they’ve already had many times, one where the heat of the argument has given way to simmering resentment. My father tells him to be quiet and my mother hands me an onion for the chopping board.

  She makes enough food for a dozen people, and when she has it all on the table, my father claps his hands and breathes deeply before he says grace. He always did this, but I’d forgotten about it until just now. George and I would roll our eyes at each other just before we folded our hands to pray. I look at my brother and he meets my eye and, for a moment, he smiles, the same mischievous smile he had at eleven, and I can see him just as he was, as though no time has passed. My father thanks God for bringing me back to their house, and my mother squeezes my hand in hers as though she could knit our flesh together.