But we had.
Because of the crowd it took me longer than I had counted on to find them. Outside, I cut across the parking lot and headed toward the embankment, where they were already getting into it. Balint and the guy stood shouting loudly at each other, grabbing each other’s clothing in a tangle of limbs. The guy’s two friends arrived as well. One began kicking Balint in the back, though it didn’t seem to faze him. Next, the other jumped Balint from the side, taking him to the ground. They were just about to surround him, to stomp on him a bit, when I arrived with my wine bottle. I ran toward them so my blow would have the greatest impact, and with the sole of my boot I kicked one in the spine, sending him flying a few yards. Without waiting for them to react I swung at the tattooed guy’s head with the bottle. It shattered against his left temple, leaving just the jagged neck in my hand. He staggered backward a few yards, and then collapsed.
The third guy turned toward me. He spotted me starting for him with the piece of broken glass in my hand. Before he could charge me, Balint got him from behind, grabbed his neck, and clamped his head forward. It was a commando hold, one we had practiced in the school bathroom. After a few good seconds, the brain can’t get enough oxygen. There was terror in guy’s expression when he realized he wouldn’t be able to get free. He was on the ground in under ten seconds. Balint grinned at me. I saw his teeth were bloody. We heard the sound of the boy’s boots on the cement as he fled the scene.
We set on the guy with the tattoo. I kicked him twice to wake him up. He tucked into a fetal position, shouting, “Don’t hit me!” Balint also kicked him a few times, not sparing his head, because Balint wasn’t wearing his steel-tips. The boy’s face was a bloody mess. His nose was broken, and shards from the bottle left their mark on his cheek. Balint straddled his chest and began to beat him until he couldn’t speak. The hot blood steamed in the air. Balint got off him, fists covered in red. The guy was still breathing; we saw the rise and fall of his chest.
“Break his hand,” said Balint, panting. I jumped on the guy’s arm with all my strength. I lost my balance from the force of the blow and staggered backward.
“Sure it’s broken?” asked Balint, wiping the blood from his hand on the guy’s singlet.
“I don’t know. I didn’t hear the crack. They usually crack.”
“Take another shot.”
I took aim and kicked. No sound.
“Wait, I’ll lift his hand. Aim for the wrist, that will do it for sure.” I stepped back a few yards to wind up. Balint lifted the guy’s hand and held it in the air. I ran toward him and kicked. The steel tip hit exactly on his wrist and we heard the crack of the bone. Balint let the hand drop and it fell, twisted, on the ground.
“Do you have your cell phone on you?” he asked, still panting. He spat some blood on the body.
“Sure.”
“Take a picture.”
It was dark out, but the phone light was enough to illuminate his face.
We arrived at the hospital around three the next day. On the way it occurred to us that we should bring a gift, so we stopped at a gas station convenience store and bought some chocolate. Balint’s hand was wrapped up, like always after a fight. He could hit correctly for the first few swings, but after that the madness took hold and he stopped paying attention.
We knew we couldn’t go near the disco for a few weeks because the paramedics had to file assault charges due to the great bodily harm we’d inflicted, but this didn’t bother us one bit. “We really gave them what they had coming to them,” Balint said in the elevator and patted me on the back. “We needed to.”
“They got what they had coming to them,” I said with a grin.
“Hell yeah.”
We arrived at the trauma ward. The same blonde as yesterday was at reception. She gestured that we could proceed. We strolled down the hall and opened the door. Chaba had company. His mother, a woman in her fifties with a red dye job, was standing over him. She was saying goodbye.
“Now here are your friends, darling,” she said, sounding touched. “Chaba said you come regularly. You really are good friends, really.” She said goodbye to her boy and left. She had afternoon work cleaning offices, on weekends too. There was no avoiding the two sloppy kisses she planted on our cheeks.
“Sorry for my mom. That’s just how she is,” said Chaba after her footsteps disappeared down the hallway. He was in better shape than yesterday. He could even sit up.
“No problem,” I said. “That’s just how mothers are.”
“When do they say you can return to school?” asked Balint.
“Four or five weeks.”
“That’s a fucking long time.”
“Yeah. I’ll be home schooled like the other fuck-ups, I think.”
“They got you good.”
“Yeah, real good.”
“Show him,” said Balint. I reached into my pocket and took out my phone. I clicked on the picture, and held it in front of Chaba’s face.
“Recognize this cocksucker?”
Chaba leaned toward the screen. He looked at the picture for a long while, and then shook his head.
“No. Never seen him before. Who is he?”
We stood looking at one another for a few moments.
“This is the cocksucker we messed up yesterday. Nothing more. Just some cocksucker,” said Balint wanly.
“You guys are hard. Fucking hard,” Chaba said and leaned back.
“Yeah,” I muttered. We said goodbye because we could see Chaba was tired.
We both kept quiet on the trip home; there was nothing we could say. We just smoked and stared ahead. Balint lived in a housing development outside of town. My parents’ flat was on the road that led there, so he walked me home.
“Okay, later,” he said, then carried on.
At nine he returned in a beat-up Golf he had borrowed from his older brother.
“I was thinking we could cruise down to Csorna,” he said, grinning as I opened the door.
“Why not?” I said. We got in the car.
On the way to Csorna—a small town an hour and a half west of the big city—we smoked a couple of joints. It was Saturday night and the club we always went to there was like a zoo. Balint got aggressively drunk at the bar, then picked out a group of six guys and got into it with them. He’d chosen them because there was no way we would win.
I hung my head and followed in the direction of the parking lot.
Registration
A pickup truck was speeding along the dirt road, its wheels beating up dust. It slowed, and came to a stop. Two men opened the doors and stepped out of the vehicle. They stood side by side off the road.
“You’re not circumcised, huh?” said one. The man standing next to him, shorter by a head, finished up his business.
“No,” he answered and zipped his pants. He took out a cigarette and lit up. The other man also finished urinating, and squinted into the setting sun.
“Hey, how far can you piss?”
“I don’t know,” said the stocky one. He thought about it. “A few yards.” The weather had painted their blue fatigues gray. They both got back in the vehicle. They drove on in their white Mitsubishi, the bed in the back empty. In the cab, paper was scattered about and there was an empty cola bottle they used as an ashtray. From the rearview mirror hung a brown, plastic rosary that swung back and forth with the rhythm of the rocking vehicle. David was the name of the one asking questions. He sat in the passenger seat, fumbling with a white, three-ring binder. When he got tired of it he dropped the binder into his lap and turned to his companion.
“What does it feel like?”
“What does what feel like?” responded François, his English laden with a thick French accent. François clutched the wheel and watched the road.
“What else? What’s it like to have a foreskin?”
“I don’t know, what’s the difference? If I had the chance, I would have had it removed,” said François, turning on the headlig
hts. The dirt road flashed brown in the beams of light.
“Why would you want to get it done?”
“What’s it to you?”
“It’s just that I don’t know anybody with foreskin,” said David, smirking. “So why?”
“Because I couldn’t pull it back, that’s why.”
They went quiet for a bit; David fumbled with the binder, François watched the road. He looked over at the GPS by the wheel, checking where they were again. A red dot on the device showed the town’s location, a place that three days before had been burned to the ground by the local militia. The government forces had since beaten the militia back over the border, and the roads were once again safe to travel. Seventy-two people from the town had been killed.
“I hate doing this now,” grumbled François. “What’s wrong with morning?”
“In the morning the delegation came,” said David.
“And?”
“There needed to be a reception.”
“I don’t like going at night.”
“We’ll get it done in no time.”
They stopped talking. David became absorbed in the NGO’s special report. Nobody knew why the fighting had started. The Dinka people who lived in the town were neutral parties in the war. Members of this small tribe were readily recognizable by the v-shaped scarring on their faces. There were scarcely two thousand in the entire country.
“I hope they buried them right this time,” said François, and began to search for something on the radio.
“Yeah, the last time it stank to high heaven,” David said, grinning at his French colleague’s indignation.
“Right? It was fucking unbearable,” said François. He gave up on finding a signal. They were too far from the base’s transmission; only the noise of static filled the car.
“They should have shown that to the delegation,” he grumbled as he turned off the radio. “The kind of stinking shit we work in.”
David tried to imagine what the woman at the reception would have said about the previous village. Everybody had lined up to greet the guests, the entire staff, all forty of them. The commander gave a long speech as the guests sat in the shade drinking lemonade. A woman at lunch had complained to the commander about what strong smells there were in Africa. David could hardly contain his laughter when he overheard this. If not attended to in time, dead bodies would rot in days in the 108-degree heat.
François looked at the GPS, slowed, and turned off the road. They would have to continue on loose, grassy earth. David strained to look into the dusk. After a few minutes the remnants of huts appeared. The two gazed at the blackened walls against the horizon. François turned off the motor but left the headlights burning. He grabbed a camera from the back seat. David, binder in his hand, got out of the car.
“Let’s start with the women. Were they separated?” asked François.
David flipped through the papers, plucked out a photocopied form, checked the information, and looked up.
“No. Everybody’s together. Theoretically, the pit is two hundred yards north from the well.”
“And where is the well?” asked François as he turned on his camera and checked the flash.
They stood looking around for a moment before David set off between the bullet-pocked hut remnants. After a brief search he found the well. It was a pit surrounded by mud bricks; a few steps away stood a trough. On the ground lay a leather sack with a long strap, which was fixed to a brick. The villagers used this to bring up the water. By the well were the tire tracks of the soldiers’ jeeps. To shoot at the houses, they would have had to stop here. David stepped up to the well’s perimeter. He took out his compass and checked the direction.
“That way,” he said, pointing. They both started off. They beat their way through some bush, and continued on the white alkaline soil. The sun’s last rays lit up the horizon, casting everything in the color of congealed blood.
“And what do women say, when they see you’re not circumcised?” asked David as he lifted a few branches from their way. François stopped and took a cigarette from his pocket, lit up, and offered David the pack.
“Nothing. Usually nothing. Or, well, there was one … but she didn’t really say anything,” he said flatly.
“Then what did she do?” asked David and took a drag from his cigarette.
“She just pulled it back. She lifted it up and yanked the whole thing back,” François demonstrated the action in the air.
“Did it rip? Was there blood?”
“So much that I thought I’d shit myself.”
They both shuddered at the thought. Quiet fell on the bush.
Something was lying on the ground on the path in front of them. In the dusk they couldn’t make out what it was, though they could smell decomposition. An unctuous odor filled the air.
“Goddamn it, if they left somebody here, I am not going farther,” said François. He stopped and tried to make out the contours of the body lying in front of them. David went ahead to have a look. It was a donkey, its tongue hanging from the side of its mouth, its hide swarming with maggots. The body steamed in the cooling air. Cursing, François went after David. They gave the carrion a wide berth.
“Why isn’t it with the rest?” asked François.
“They don’t put the bodies of animals next to people,” said David.
“Why not?”
“Beats me.”
An oblong pit soon appeared before them. Next to it was a mound. The people who had dug the pit had obviously thrown the dirt there. Shovels were sticking out of the red soil, a sign the workers might be coming back. The two stepped to the edge. The pit was about a yard deep, and ten yards long. The black bodies had been carefully placed side by side along the bottom. David began to count, but soon lost track. François took pictures.
Using the flash, they saw that the people had been laid in the ditch with no regard for age: women, men, old, and young alike. Their clothing was soaked through with blood and their bodies had begun to decay in the equatorial weather. Despite this it could still be seen that the men had been killed with bullets, while the rest had been murdered with bayonets and rifle butts. They knew this because only the men’s heads showed no wounds. The two stood quietly for a little while.
“Is it possible you didn’t fuck the coordinator like last time?” said François and spat on the ground. David grimaced, and then began to take notes.
“Now is it seventy or seventy-two?” He looked questioningly at François.
“I don’t know. I didn’t count.”
“Then count.”
“Count my cock. What’s the difference, if it’s plus or minus a few? Write seventy.”
The case number was already printed on the form. Only the geographical coordinates, the number of victims, and the name of the village needed to be filled in. David took out a pen and wrote in the number, then scratched his head with the pen.
“What was the reason?”
“For what?”
“For the killings.”
“How should I know? Obviously the soldiers had something to do with it.”
“Obviously,” said David, staring into the ditch. “It’s also possible that the villagers started it.”
“Do these look like people who play rough?” grumbled François and spat into the pit.
“Aren’t you just a little interested in what happened here?” asked David, unclipping a pocket light from his belt and shining it into the ditch.
“Write whatever you want,” said François, and he resumed taking pictures.
David finished filling out the form. In the “Cause” line he wrote “Unknown,” then shined the light into the pit again. There he noticed the untouched body of a girl. She was young, perhaps fifteen. Her left breast had fallen from her dress, and a man’s hand rested on her stomach. Her face showed no wounds. They must have stabbed her from behind.
“Look how beautiful she was,” he said, bending over the pit. “There isn’t even an
y tribal scarring on her,” he added.
François also looked into the ditch, and then began to smirk. He stood and with a stick pushed away the man’s hand, so as to take in her whole body.
“So like the women in Abéché,” said David.
“How do you know? You didn’t come with us once.”
“Of course not. They’ll rot your cock off.”
“The little Jew is touchy about his circumcised cock.”
“I’m not touchy. I just heard that last year they cut somebody’s whole prick off because he got some kind of infection.”
“Bullshit. Nothing like that happened,” said François and lit a cigarette. David also took one and lit up.
“I’m only saying. In the end the dude couldn’t even walk. Some name starting with an “R”: Ronald or Robert. An Irish radioman. I heard about it in the canteen.”
“The Irish are Catholics. They don’t even cut off their foreskins,” said François, grinning.
“Cutting off the foreskin is beside the point here. If you stick it in a rotten place, it goes rotten. Supposedly the guy swelled up like a billy club. And it was all cheesed over.”
The Devil Is a Black Dog Page 9