by Dave Eggers
—We need to rest and we’ll rest here. Otherwise you will hear from the rebels.
—But we have nothing to give you, the chief insisted.—We were raided by the rebels just two days ago. You can sit here and rest, but we can’t feed you.
His eyes swept over the line of us, still pouring into the town from the path, boys upon boys appearing from the forest and filling the village. He switched his pipe from one side of his mouth to the other.
—No one could feed so many, the chief said.
Dut was unfazed.—I want you to know the implications of what you’re saying. The chief paused and produced a loud, resigned snort. A second snort was more conciliatory. Dut turned to us.
—Sit here. Don’t move until I get back.
Dut followed the chief into his compound. We rested on the grass, hungry and thirsty and angry at this village. The meeting of Dut and the chief lasted far longer than it should have, and the sun rose high over us, examining and punishing us. None of us had shade, and we were afraid to leave. But soon we could not sit still. Some of the boys moved a few hundred yards to sit under a tree. Other boys, older boys, took it upon themselves to retrieve some food on their own. We watched as they crawled into a nearby home and found a calabash of nuts, with which they fled.
The scene that followed was chaos. First the screaming of women. Then a dozen men giving chase. When they could not catch the three thieves, they came after the rest of us, spears in hand. We ran, all two hundred and fifty of us, in every direction, finally settling on a path out of the village, the same way we had entered. We ran for an hour, as the men chased us and caught some of the slower boys and punished them as we retraced most of the path that we had spent all day walking. This is why our walk took longer than it might have: it was not a straight route, it was anything but.
When we stopped running, Kur gathered and counted us. There were six missing.—Where is Dut? he asked.
We had no idea. Kur was the oldest boy there, so everyone looked to him for answers. He didn’t know where Dut was and this was troubling.
—We’ll stay here until Dut comes back, he said.
Five boys were injured. One had been stuck in the shoulder with a spear. This boy was carried by Kur to a place under a tree, where he was given water. Kur did not know how to help the boy. The only place where he could be helped was the village that had done this to him. We had nothing and no one with us to help anyone with any injury whatsoever.
Three boys were sent with the most injured boy back to the village for treatment. I am not sure what happened to these boys, for we never saw them again. I like to believe that they were taken in by the villagers who felt regretful for what they had done to us.
These were bad days. Dut did not rejoin us for a full day, leaving Kur in charge. This was not in itself a disadvantage; Kur’s sense of direction seemed more assured than Dut’s, his uncertainty about the journey less overt than Dut’s. But Dut was our leader, even though he often brought bad luck with him. Shortly after he returned, a lion leapt across our path in the dark and took two boys, devouring them in the high grass. We did not pause for long to listen.
When we passed other travelers, they warned us of murahaleen in the area. Always we were ready to run; every boy had a plan if the militias came. Every new landscape we encountered we first had to examine for places to hide, paths to follow. We knew that these rumors of their nearness were correct because Deng was wearing one of their headdresses.
We had been walking one day, our limbs leaden but our eyes alert, when he saw it in a tree. A piece of white material, stuck in the branches, flapping in the wind. I lifted Deng up enough so that he could retrieve it, and Kur confirmed that it had been worn by a Baggara; we could not guess at how it had ended up in a tree.
—Can I wear it? Deng asked Kur.
—You want to wear it like an Arab wears it?
—No. I’ll wear it differently.
And he did. He arranged it loosely atop his head, looking absurd but claiming that it kept him cool. The effort he had to expend to keep it out of his eyes and from falling to the ground surely negated any immediate benefits, but I said nothing. I knew a piece of sturdy cloth like that might come in handy at some point.
But it was soon over and I was home. I was home and was helping my mother with the fire. My brothers were playing just beyond the compound, and my father was sitting on his chair, outside, with a cup of wine resting at his feet. Far off in the village, I could hear singing—the choir practicing that same hymn they sang four hundred times a day. Chickens chirped and roosters wailed, dogs howled and tried to eat through baskets to get at the humans’ food. A round bright moon hung over Marial Bai, and I knew the young men of the village would be out, making trouble. Nights like this were long nights, when the activity all around would make sleeping difficult, so I rarely made any effort to sleep. I lay awake, listening, imagining what everyone was doing, what each sound meant. I guessed at voices, at the distance between myself and each sound. For my mother’s benefit I kept my eyes closed most of the night, but at least a few times on these nights, I had opened my eyes to find my mother’s open, too. On these occasions, we had shared a sleepy smile. And it was this way tonight, when I found myself again warm in my mother’s home, close to her yellow dress, the heat of her body. It was good to be home, and when I had told my family of my adventures, they were greatly intrigued and impressed.
—Look at him, a voice said.—Dreaming of his mother, the voice said. It sounded like Deng. I had told him about my family; I had told him so much.
I opened my eyes. Deng was there but we were not inside my mother’s home. In an instant everything warm inside me went cold. I was outside, sleeping in the circle of the boys, and the air was sharper than at any other night of our walking.
I did not move. Deng was above me, behind him not the warm crimsons and ochres of my mother’s home, but only the burnt black of the moonless sky. I closed my eyes, wishing, stupidly I knew, that I could will myself back into the dream. How strange that a dream could make you warm when your body knew exactly how cold it was. How strange it was to be sleeping there with all of these boys, in this interlocking circle, under a lightless sky. I wanted to punish Deng for not being my mother and brothers. But without him I could not live. To see his face each day—that was the only tether I had.
In the group there were many boys who became strange. One boy would not sleep, at night or during the day. He refused to sleep for many days, because he wanted always to see what was coming, to see any threats that might befall us. Eventually he was left in a village, in the care of a woman who held him in her lap, and within minutes he was asleep. There was another boy who dragged a stick behind him, making a line in the dirt so he would know his way home. He did this for two days until one of the older boys took his stick and broke it over his head. Another boy thought the walking was a game and jumped and ran and teased the other boys. He played tag with them and found no one willing to play along. He stopped playing when he was kicked hard in the back by a boy who was tired of watching him prance about. A boy named Ajiing was stranger: he saved all the food given to him. He saved the food—groundnut paste, mostly—in a shirt he had brought with him. He would only dip into the shirt once a day, to retrieve enough of the gummy mixture to cover his first three fingers. He would lick these clean and then tie his shirt back again. He was preparing for many weeks without food. But most of the boys only walked and spoke little because there was nothing to say.
—The blue dog!
Four days after we were driven out of the village by the men and their spears, we came upon the blue dog again. Deng saw him first.
—Is it really the same one? I asked.
—Of course it is, Deng said, kneeling down to pet him.
The animal was far fatter than when we last saw her. We could not understand how the dog could have made it so far from its home. Had it been following us these days, staying out of sight but keeping pace with us? A
head of us we heard commotion, the voices of boys. We went to the voices and the blue dog followed us reluctantly.
The blue dog, it turned out, was not far from its home. I saw that the trees in this place were familiar. Soon we realized that it was the happy village. We had been walking in a circle; we had retraced our steps for many days and now we were again at the bustling village we had seen not long ago, the village where the boys had taunted us with their new white shoes and where the women fed us and sent us on our way. They had denied the threat of the murahaleen but now they were gone. Where the village had been, there was nothing. The homes had been lifted into the sky. There were only black rings where the structures had stood. The thoroughness of the erasure was complete.
And then I saw the bodies. Arms and heads in bushes, in the remains of huts. And far off, the blue dog was chewing on something. We then knew how she had grown so plump.
Out of the tall grass a woman ran to our group. She was carrying a baby in a sling around her torso. As she got closer, the baby became two babies, twins, and the woman began to wail and scream uncontrollably. Her hand was wrapped in pink cloth, soaked through with blood. Now our boys were everywhere in the village, inspecting the damage and touching things I would never touch.
—Get back here! Dut yelled.
But he could not control the boys and their curiosity. Not all of them had seen the murahaleen or their work firsthand. They spread out, some of them also finding and eating abandoned food, and as they plunged into the village, survivors began to emerge from hiding: women, old men, children, more boys. The woman with the two babies in the sling could not stop wailing, and Kur sat her down and tried to calm her. I sat and turned myself from the woman and from the women that came after her. I put my fingers in my ears. I knew it all already and I was tired.
We spent the night there. There was still food in the village, and it was decided that it was the safest place we could be, the site of a recent attack. As we rested, many more came from the forest and grass. They talked to Dut and shared information, and in the morning we left the village with eighteen new boys. They were very quiet boys, and none wore cloud-white shoes.
—My stomach hurts, Deng said.—Achak.
—Yes.
—Does your stomach hurt like this? Like something is inside, moving around? Do you have this?
It was many days later and I had no patience for this. Everyone’s stomach hurt; the stomachs of us all were growing hard and round and we were accustomed to the pains of hunger. I said something to this effect, hoping it would assuage Deng’s fears and quiet him.
—But this is a new pain, Deng said.—It feels lower than before. Like someone’s pinching me, stabbing me.
I had difficulty mustering sympathy for Deng when I was so hungry myself. My own hunger would ebb and flow and when it came to me I felt it everywhere. I felt it in my stomach and chest and arms and thighs.
—I miss my mother, Deng said.
—I want my home, he said.
—I need to stop walking, he said.
I walked ahead in the line so I would not have to hear Deng’s bleating. Most of us were stoic, accepting of the futility in complaining. Deng’s behavior was an affront to the way we walked.
In the afternoon sky, a jagged blast. We stopped. Again the sound came; it was now clear that it was a gun. Again and again the blasts came, five times. Dut stopped the group and listened.
—Sit. Sit and wait, he said.
He ran ahead. When he came back he was grinning.
—They’ve killed an elephant. Come now! Everyone will eat meat today.
We began to run. No one knew all that Dut had said but they had heard the word meat. We ran after Dut and Kur Garang Kur.
I ran and the ground beneath my feet flew because I ran so fast, jumping over rocks and brush. We all ran, boys laughing. It had been weeks since we had eaten meat of any kind. I was happy but while running my head was conflicted. I was so hungry, my hunger splitting me everywhere, but in my clan the elephant was sacred. None of my people in Marial Bai would ever contemplate killing, much less eating, an elephant, but still I ran to the animal. No other boy seemed to hesitate; they ran like they were not sick, like they had not been walking so long. We were not dying boys at that moment, we were not those who were walking. We were hungry boys who were about to feast on fresh meat.
When we got close we saw a small grey mountain, and everywhere around the mountain were boys. There were hundreds of boys, ten deep around the elephant. One boy was tearing the elephant’s ear. He had climbed onto the head of the beast and was ripping the elephant’s ear from its skull. Another boy was standing against the elephant, with his hand and wrist missing, and his shoulder red with blood. A moment later the boy’s hand had been restored, but was covered in blood. It had been inside the elephant; he had thrust it in where the bullet had created an opening. He had grabbed whatever meat he could and was eating it, raw, his face dripping with the animal’s blood.
Near the elephant were two men wearing uniforms, carrying guns. As the boys tore into the animal, I watched the men.
—Who are they? I asked Kur.
—That’s your army, he said.—That’s the hope of the Dinka.
I watched as Dut and Kur and one of the soldiers helped to cut into the elephant’s hide. They opened a long slice at the top of the elephant and then the boys, ten at a time, would peel the skin back, ripping it down, pulling it to the ground. Underneath, the elephant was as red as a burn. The boys leapt into the animal, biting and ripping flesh, and when each boy had a handful of meat, they ran off like hyenas to gnaw under trees.
Some boys began to eat immediately. Others did not know if they should wait to cook the meat. It was morning, and many boys were not sure how long they would stay here, with the elephant, and if they would be allowed to take meat with them.
The SPLA soldiers had started a large fire. Dut ordered five boys to gather wood in order to grow the flames. Kur started another fire on the other side of the elephant, and we who had not already eaten our meat roasted it on sticks.
The soldiers were pleased to see us eating and they talked to us in a friendly manner. I sat next to Deng, watching him eat. It felt so good to see Deng eating, though Deng ate without smiling, and did not enjoy the meat as the others did. His eyes were yellowed at the rims, his mouth cracked and spotted white. But he ate as much as he could. He ate until he could eat no more.
When the eating was done, we took full notice of the group of rebels sitting around a giant heglig tree. We gathered around the men and stared.
Dut quickly interfered.
—Give them room to breathe, boys! You’re like mosquitoes. We took a few steps back but then slowly closed in again. The men smiled, appreciating the attention.
—We had some trouble in Gok Arol Kachuol, Dut said.
—What sort of trouble? one of the rebels asked.
Dut brought one of the injured boys forward. His leg had been cut with a spear.
—Who did this? the rebel demanded.
The man was named Mawein, and he was suddenly standing, enraged. Dut explained what had happened, that we had walked peacefully to the village, had been refused food and then chased from the town by men throwing spears. He left out the part involving the theft of the nuts, and no boys thought it necessary to bring it up. We were filled with pride and anticipation, watching Mawein’s anger grow.
—They did this to Red Army boys? Boys with no weapons? Dut could taste the revenge and added to their sins.—They chased us for half a day. They wanted no rebels. They called us rebels and cursed the SPLA.
Mawein laughed.—This chief will see us soon. Was it the man with the pipe?
—Yes, Dut said.—Many of the men had pipes.
—We know this place. Tomorrow we’ll visit this village and discuss with them the treatment of the Red Army boys.
—Thank you, Mawein, Dut said. He had adopted a tone of great reverence. Mawein nodded to him.
> —Now eat some more food, he said.—Eat while you can.
We ate while staring at the men. Each soldier had around him twenty boys who ate without taking their eyes from him. The men seemed huge, the biggest men we had seen in months. They were very healthy, their muscles carved and their faces confident. These were the men who could fight the murahaleen or the government army. The men embodied all of our rage and spoke to every hope we could conjure.
—Are you winning the war? I asked.
—Which war is that, jaysh al-ahmar?
I paused a moment.—What is that word you used?
—Jaysh al-ahmar.
—What does that mean?
—Dut, you don’t teach these boys anything?
—These boys are not yet jaysh al-ahmar, Mawein. They’re very young.
—Young? Look at some of these kids. They’re ready to fight! These are soldiers! Look at those three.
He pointed to three of the older boys, still cooking meat over the fire.
—They’re tall, yes, but very young. The same age as these here.
—We’ll see about that, Dut.
—Are you winning the war, Mawein? Deng tried.—The war against the murahaleen?
Mawein looked to Dut and then back at Deng.
—Yes, boy. We are winning that war. But the war is against the government of Sudan. You know this, don’t you?
As many times as Dut explained it to me, it still confused me. Our villages were being attacked by the murahaleen, but the rebels left the villages unattended to fight elsewhere, against the government army. It was baffling for me then, and was for many years to come.
—You want to hold it? Mawein said, indicating his gun. I did want to hold it, very much.
—Sit down. It’s very heavy for you.
I sat down and Mawein made some adjustments to the gun and then rested it on my lap. I worried that it might be very hot but when it rested on my bare legs it was very heavy but cool to the touch.
—Heavy, right? Try carrying that all day, jaysh al-ahmar.
—What does that mean, jaysh al-ahmar? I whispered. I knew that Dut didn’t want us to know the answer to this question.