The vibrations of the ground became louder.
How had she saved my life? She did not know my heart rate or blood pressure. She was not monitoring my breathing. She inserted no IV line to give antibiotics or fluids or nutrients. I had starved. I was shutting down. My fat reserves had been completely exhausted with only protein as a fuel source for my body. Organ function must have declined. How many times have I treated people in this state? Was I septic? Had Oenone not saved me, what would have been my ultimate cause of death? Cardiac arrest brought on by tissue degradation and electrolyte imbalance?
* * *
Oenone
I LED THE WOMEN AND children onward and we reached the far mountains without many deaths. Most of the young ones made it alive, though not all. Pyres were needed along the way, tears fell to the ground as the cinders drifted skyward.
On the way to the mountain village, we passed the town. At night a few of us crept along its empty streets. Starving dogs and cats were about. The soldiers’ camp was on the far side of the slums. The main street was quiet and I snuck into my home. The walls were the same; some pieces of broken furniture were still about, but nothing else. In my husband’s garage everything was taken.
We crept inside the Colonial Hotel. In the basement, there was a locked door. Black and hard to see at all, my hand reached up along the top of the wall for the crack in the ledge. Yes, there it was, my fingers had it, the key.
Inside the pantry were still some tins of tomatoes, some olives, sardines. Dusty bottles of Fanta and cola. We carried what we could, and the next night went back for the rest. Everything was shared. The children’s faces—confused, delighted, eating this blind food, having had so little to eat—this was enough to keep us going. Some became sick with diarrhea because the food was too strong. For me, the salt of the olives, the oily sardines, the fizz of the Fanta and cola—I had tried these many times before the war, but they did not taste as good as they now did.
Oh yes, my child, the key. After my husband went away, I often helped in the kitchen there. The owners were my close friends, a foreign couple who came to our town to visit but stayed on to renovate and run the hotel.
I knew where the key was because it was right where I’d left it. I was in the basement of the hotel the morning the war arrived, angry that my former husband was still across the road pretending to sell leather. I thought he was there because of me, that he was taunting me.
The pantry had a strong metal door. Maybe no one had managed to break it open? So we went to see. Inside we found that only mice had entered. They had long since taken the flour and other grains. The cans were right where I’d unloaded them all those years earlier.
So my child, it was with full bellies and smiles that we pressed onward for the mountains. They were steeper and we could not take the main trails and roads for fear of the soldiers. When we finally came upon the village it was morning. Something was wrong. I had expected that all of the huts and buildings would be fallen or burned, which they were. But I did not expect to see a northern army building. It had a metal roof with cinderblock walls. Truck after truck must have brought these materials here. Why? We stayed away a good distance in the bush. The children were taken farther up the mountain where their crying or playing would not be heard.
It was a jail. There seemed to be two or three guards only; young recruits who sat around playing cards and sleeping mostly. They had a fire where they cooked food, and sometimes went inside to check on or feed the prisoners.
Mama Oenone, oh what are we going to do? the people asked of me.
I could not show them my concern at the presence of the jail, or that I did not know what the right course of action was to take. So I stood up and walked toward where the huts and buildings were. Several were in some state of repair and just needed their walls supported. I began to fix up one of these huts. I did not acknowledge the men, who I could feel looking at me. I just went about my work. In twos and threes, the other women came out of the bush to help me. We fixed two of the huts and spent the night inside. I’m not sure any of us slept. But the morning came and we still had our arms and legs, so we set to work on one of the buildings that needed just a roof. It took much of the day, but by nightfall it was ready. We sent for the children and the other women. This became the pattern of our days, finding food in the bush, getting water, feeding children, fixing huts and the other buildings that we could.
The northern soldiers ignored us. We began to understand that they were especially young; a commander came by jeep every few days to inspect the jail. We would hide in the bush when we heard the motor on its way up the mountain. It was late in the day of their rule, and they knew it. Why bother with stray women and children? We watched the boy guards though, especially at night.
There was an incident early on that I will tell you about, my child. There are parts of this story that are hard to pass along. Sometimes I think it might be better if you didn’t have such a complete story. But if the story is given properly it must be intact and whole.
There was drinking at the jail after dark one evening, rough laughing. Two guards came upon one of our huts, a machete drawn. One held down a girl who was not yet properly a woman, the other stood with the knife held high. I could see and smell he was drunk. While the girl still struggled and pleaded with the boy who was now on top of her, from behind I came upon the one with the knife, smashing a rock against his skull. He fell to the ground. With his long knife now in my hand, the other boy stopped his struggle and stood, his eyes frightened.
Mama, I am a good boy. He pointed at the one on the ground who now had blood in his hair. He tells me it is time for me to know a woman, that’s all. I don’t come here again.
I took the machete tip and dug it into him. I curse you, I say looking at his eyes. If you ever again try to take from a woman what is not being freely given, you will die every time you sleep. I will come to you in every dream and run this blade across your throat. This curse cannot be lifted. Take this man away and throw his body from a mountainside so they do not think you are responsible for his death. Tell them he became drunk and mad and ran away into the bush.
Some days later the boy was joined by a new guard, but none ever came to our huts again when we slept.
We waited. Word of the change in power came with snatches of story brought to us by fleeing women and children. They’d been told where we were headed and had set out on their own journey to find us, in desperation. Were there others that did not make it, did not find us?
One woman arrived in our village to tell us that elections were being held in the capital, and that she had witnessed blind troops in large trucks with weapons on the streets. She said that the northern army had retreated to the other side of the southern mountains. Men and women came and filmed this change in power, she said, for worldwide news. The people gave fish and flowers to the blind troops as gifts, urging them to stay. But she had no further information on the outcome of the election. She had left on a truck before voting day. She had to find her husband, she said. Later, she said, she found herself lost on the road, hungry, and followed other women into the mountains, hoping together they would find us.
Increasingly, newcomers travelled the road over the mountains and found us, bringing stories of the new peace, the election victory of the South. A landslide, they said. There had been music in the streets, offered one. Shops opened and the first train ran in four years, said another.
Then our village became a battlefield. Northern troops arrived in trucks and jeeps to evacuate the jail. We fled into the bush, taking the children with us, high into the mountains. I stayed nearby, hidden. The men were tearing down their barracks, evacuating prisoners, when southern troops appeared on the opposite road and a firefight broke out. The northern soldiers were greater in number and they lit fires and shot and shot, setting the bush and a number of our huts ablaze and upending cans of petrol as they fled. Through the sm
oke and shouting I watched as the northern jeeps drove off, around the mountain, in retreat.
We came down out of the mountains as the sun was setting. Three southern soldiers remained behind at the jail; the others pressed on after the northern army. I went over to speak with them. One of the men was the son of a woman I knew well from the town. She was married to a crooked dentist—well, not so much a dentist as a man who pulled out people’s teeth for too much money. My child, this is funny, as a boy the dentist’s son had a perfect smile. All his teeth, right there in place. And he carried it along with him into manhood. Yes, he was handsome.
Mama Oenone, we captured a northern soldier and have found several prisoners, he said to me after we recognized one another. One is almost dead.
Can he be saved? I asked.
He is a blind. We want to save him. He might be worth money to a foreign government. Can you help? We are too busy with the other prisoners.
Not if he is to be sold, I said.
My mother always told me you were the most principled politician she’d known.
Did your mother vote for me? I would have thought that impossible. Your father hated me, but loved my husband.
My mother loved you. You were the opposite of my father, whom she loathed. We laughed together at the memory of the crooked dentist.
I will save the blind man. But I have a whole village here to look after. Nothing more.
That is all we ask, he said. We do not know who any of the other prisoners are anyway. They speak about places that no longer exist and factions none of us know. We will hold them until further orders.
The next morning we awoke to a scuffle. The northern soldier was screaming and crying. It was the guard. The boy I had cursed. The son of the dentist was pointing a rifle into his back and asking him the real name of the Colonel. The boy did not know. He was pushed to his knees.
The dentist’s son then said, to the sky more than anything else, The Colonel killed my father. You follow the Colonel. So I kill you. And the shot rang out and hung in the air before being taken in by the trees and the clouds and the soil. The boy had been shot in the head, the barrel of the gun having been pushed into his mouth.
My child, this is the horror of war. There is no innocent, no guilty, no law, only individual men who have had their stories taken, and so are no longer men at all.
I saved two bottles of cola from the Colonial Hotel. I thought that they should be kept in case we needed them to bargain with northern soldiers, or even southern soldiers. What situations would we find ourselves in? So I kept two. I decided to open one to use on the blind prisoner.
The dentist’s son helped me lift the blind prisoner to his feet. We did this several times a day. He began to talk English. His name was Paris. He was a doctor.
In the village we cooked in a drum left over from the northern army. We made soups from the old bush recipes that our mothers taught us as girls. We laughed together as some among us remembered our mothers cooking here in this village. Then, when we left here we believed we would never return, never eat this food again! But here we are. We laughed together as we chopped roots and wild herbs, skinned and cleaned rodents and song birds, stoked the fire.
I fed him the soup. He talked now in broken thoughts. With effort his spoken language came back to my tongue. I still remembered many of the words. But how to say the ideas I needed for he and I to understand one another? It was not always simple. We strained to overcome.
What crime did this man commit? My child, I had to know. The dentist’s son did not know. How could he? The prisoners were simply transferred from the North to the South when the jail changed hands. So when he was strong enough, after I had sung to him for many nights and days, fed him and rocked him, walked him and cleaned his body with water and soap given to me by the guard, after I had done all this, I held him close in the early evening and asked him to confess his crime.
My child, this is what he said: I gave up on myself. Oh there was such shame in his voice, and on his face.
Now I was shy. I had already had the stirrings, you see, the great rush from within, my steps hurrying when I was to next go to him, bring him food, caress his face, sing to him. I had already felt these intimate signs. Each alone not enough to notice, but when gathered up and braided together around and around, a vessel was being made. Something to hold in the palms, like a cup. Then bigger, in outstretched hands, a bowl. Then larger still. Until you needed your arms open wide just to carry its breadth and depth, a barrel. I was in love with the blind doctor, Paris.
When I lost my son in the dark of the mountains to the snake, but before I threw his lifeless, innocent body on the pyre and poured myself into the sky until I felt no more, felt nothing left of him, I took a tooth. I have kept it in the fold of my dress, next to me, ever since. There is always more left. It can never be all poured away. There is a private place that a mother keeps something of her dead child. A place she can go when there is time, when it is safe and when she can be alone. There, she may hold what is left and she may be for a while the mother again of that child. She may bring that child back to life, hear his delightful laugh, his curious questions, feel the breath of him against her cheek and neck. She may return the purity of him to this world, and share her love with the child at night, even when in a camp as the rest of the women and children sleep, or on the long march across the plain under the stars, or in a mountain hut waiting for a war to turn.
Now I had a new innocent. My son had given me a blind doctor. I gave Paris the small tooth. I used the words in his language to explain this gift. Did he understand?
As his strength returned he changed from a prisoner to my lover. He learned that all loves are one in this country. As the rain falls into the sea, as the dead animal seeps into the ground or is eaten, as fire makes way for tiny green shoots, so love once shared and accepted becomes all the other loves that came before.
My child is my husband, they are both my parents, my son is Paris. You are me.
This is a part of the story that you must grow to understand, my child. This is our country’s way to make the past the future again. It is our song. So if I do not tell it well enough, or if you do not hear it again and again, something may happen in your life that will take your story from you. War can do this. The death of your child can do this. This story will keep your basket tightly woven and you strong.
When Paris took the tooth I watched him look it over. He rolled it between the thumb and finger of those white hands. Then he tucked it into a crack in the wall. Safe there, he said. Then I washed his limp, failing body with water and some soap. I spooned soup into his mouth. I sang to him all the songs he would need for his story to begin again. After many days of attending to him, I opened the cell door and found him sitting upright by himself. He smiled. In his palm he held the tooth. Together we sang.
* * *
Paris
THERE WAS MUSIC. FINE BUT broken threads of song were finding their way to me. The bright sound of metal on metal, an improvised drum, kept the rhythm. Other hard woods were being struck together in a tapping that counterpointed the deeper tin sound. The voices, women’s voices, rose and fell away in call and response, infused with celebratory joy and cries of change, of worship, of faith, and of luck. It all washed against my cell in a high tide. They did not let up, but continued on for the day, ebbing and flowing, as different villagers took the lead.
At times their voices were strong and clear, other times the procession or gathering moved away and I lost the structure of it as it untangled into threads of sound again. As the day deepened and night approached, I heard children crying amidst the singing. I smelled the sweet smoke of a bonfire roasting meat and of something similar to cannabis. All day, coming and going, were trucks or jeeps. Greetings of welcome, horns sounding to say hello or goodbye, and a handbell was introduced into the music following the arrival of one of the motorcades.
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At night, guns fired into the air in rapid succession. Cries of joy and more song erupted. There was alcohol in the laughter now, a frenzy that was not present earlier. I collapsed in exhaustion from my second-hand exposure to this revelry, of the quality of sweet pain it unleashed in me, a sensation that was so distant I’d have thought it unrecoverable, like freedom itself.
* * *
Oenone
IN THE MORNING I WENT to him. Many of the children in the village were already awake, wandering around, their mothers still asleep. A truck’s worth of soldiers that were passing through had spent the night on the ground under the trees by the jail. They remained asleep as I passed them. The dentist’s boy had left in the night so there were no guards as I entered the wire gate to the jail. The keys to the padlocks hung on the nails in the painted white board, with numbers on them. Yesterday, there were four prisoners remaining. I saw that all the doors were open except Paris’s. The dentist’s son had left him for me.
I took the key from the white board and walked down the dirt corridor between the twenty cells. His was second from the end. I opened his door.
The Colonial Hotel Page 12