by Неизвестный
Perhaps that was the reason why there were so many American troops stationed in our capital, Heaven City. To try and convince themselves that they had been the real peacemakers after all.
People were thronging the open-air stalls at the crossroads, and these bizarre black machines were floating overhead, flying saucers with fans grafted onto them. Now and then one would take off like a low-altitude airplane. They were not quite big enough to fit a person inside them, but they were incredibly fast. Then there were robots trundling along on their thirteen legs, looking and moving like some sort of insect, not that you could find an insect that muscular and powerful anywhere in the natural world. Thinking about it, there weren’t really so many Americans here as it seemed at first glance, not in the sense of actual American people. They were around, of course, the American soldiers, but even these were matched one for one by their various machines. It had always been this way, even during the war. At least it had been whenever we’d been up against the Government Forces backed by their US technology.
The Government Forces had sent these machines into battle with us on occasion. Our main enemy might have been the dirty SLF bastards, but the Government Forces—Xema and Hoa working side by side—had been our enemy too. I’d heard there had been a time when we Xema were forced by circumstances to ally with them, but apparently a cowardly betrayal from their side had put paid to that idea. Must’ve been down to the Hoa section of the Government Forces. Not only were they ugly and brutish, they had a treacherous streak running through them a mile long, the Hoa, so it must have been their fault. Anyhow, the Government Forces would beg, borrow, or steal these half-living-half-machines from the Americans so that they could throw them in our paths, these mechanical freaks that sported miniature cannons and machine guns and could move of their own accord and would flock together to gang up on you. They moved like living creatures on their thirteen legs, and then they’d do something so quick, the sort of strange maneuver that only a machine can make, and they would be behind us, bearing down on us. I could barely count the number of my comrades that were killed by the things.
The subhuman thugs that were the Hoa, and inhuman beasts employed by the opportunistic Government Forces. That’s what we’d been up against, and in the course of fighting them, can you blame us if we started to think that we were the only ones who were normal, human? If we didn’t win and drive the Hoa out decisively, our country would be lost. I’d been bombarded with this message so incessantly that I believed it with all my heart—at least, I did at the point the war ended.
“You’ve had a tough time of it, haven’t you?” the white doctor said, looking at me with pity.
Now, I didn’t particularly have anything against this white man, but I wanted to yell at him anyway—butt the hell out of what doesn’t concern you.
Anyway, there had been this incident, and after that these white doctors had descended on our school one day and started interviewing all the so-called problem children one by one. I say “school,” but it was really some sort of fancy-schmancy institute, designed to prepare us for the brave new world with no more war. The House of Smiles. Awful name, awful place. The adults who ran the institute preached all kinds of shit at us, enough to make you want to puke. The war is over, they would say. Gone is the necessity to fight and hate each other, they would say. So stop hating the Hoa and learn to study and work alongside them, they would say.
Fuuuuuuuuuuuck that.
I—we—weren’t going around killing the Hoa out of “necessity.” Oh no. “Necessity” never came into the equation. It’s not as if we were being forced to bear some great cross called “necessity” or anything. We didn’t grin and bear it out of “necessity.” No. What had happened was we had completely transformed into children who knew nothing else, who couldn’t conceive of doing anything else. They were going around killing us, so we needed to go around killing more of them. That was the setup. How the world worked. Necessity, or duty, or anything else you wanted to call it, didn’t even come into the picture.
So, the institute. Hoa were walking around freely. The same Hoa who had raped and murdered my mother and sister were walking around without a care in the world, and we were being fed this malarkey about how we shouldn’t hate them or want revenge. So I decided one day that I would just think of our new instructors as machines. Heartless, unthinking automatons. Made in America. Just like the floating fans that hovered overhead in the alleyways, or the thirteen-legged freaks that pursued us when we retreated into the caves to escape from their armored vehicles. They were machines that looked and sounded alive at first glance, but a closer inspection would reveal they were empty on the inside.
I was in a foul mood. I didn’t have any of the Khatsticks I’d become so used to chewing on the battlefield, nor any dope. We used to use gunpowder in a pinch, snort that when we were out of the good stuff, but now that they had taken away our guns and ammo we couldn’t even fall back on that. Even a smidge of gunpowder would have been enough to zone me out. Enough to ignore the fact that a Hoa bastard was sitting right next to me. As it was, though, I was full to the brim with rage and pent-up frustration.
So long as I was in such a state, throwing me into a classroom along with a bunch of Hoa and telling me to get along nicely was a recipe for disaster. You might as well have ordered me to flip out and start mowing down my classmates with a machine gun.
All things considered, I reckon I did pretty well to hold out for a whole month.
Now, there was no doubt at all about the fact that these guys had attacked Xema villages, burnt them to the ground, killed our people, violated our women. They wouldn’t have been here otherwise. The House of Smiles was specifically for former soldiers. If they were Hoa and they had been soldiers, it was inconceivable that their hands weren’t steeped in the blood of a thousand rapes and murders.
So when I noticed a bunch of them in the corner pointing at me and laughing, I knew the time had come.
I’d been preparing for this moment, this instant, for some time: I’d taken pains to make sure I always had a sharpened pencil on me. I’d known this moment would come sooner or later, and that it was my destiny. No questions asked.
When the moment finally came I was relieved.
I didn’t even need to harden my resolve. My body moved naturally, and I found my target, in the form of the back of the hand of the disgusting Hoa nearest to me.
“Mondays are bad enough as they are,” I said, driving the point of the pencil deeper and deeper into the gaping and bleeding wound, “without having to look at your ugly fucking face.”
The Hoa squealed like a pig, but I knew that was just an act. The captain had told us as much. Hoa don’t feel any pain.
Just as I thought of the instructors as robots, the Hoa were basically just machines too. Sure, they showed all the outward signs of experiencing pain—they writhed around in agony, with tears and snot and drool streaming from their faces—just like we did, but that was no more than an act they put on to try and manipulate us, designed to try and make us feel sorry for them. In reality, they couldn’t feel any pain at all. The captain once said to me that they were more or less like zombies. After all, if the Hoa bastards could feel pain there’s no way they could have done the things they did to your father or mother or sister. It’s only because they don’t know what pain is that they can’t imagine what suffering might feel like to other people, and that’s how they could go around killing people without blinking—that’s what the captain told me. And I found his logic pretty convincing.
“Hurts, does it? Of course it doesn’t, right, you little Hoa fuck!” I shouted, driving the point of the pencil down further.
The classroom erupted in a melee, and a number of my friends rallied to my side. I pierced the Hoa’s body over and over with my knifelike pencil, stabbing him with deadly accuracy, opening up more and more holes in his body. Not to be outdone by us the Hoa started flocking round, but without AKs this couldn’t truly be called a
real battle. We pushed, we shoved, we shouted at each other. When the dust was settled, though, not a single one of the happy inhabitants of the House of Smiles had died. Our little war just petered out.
I guess I’ll be kicked out of this place now, I thought to myself.
I wondered where I was supposed to go next. Heaven City was already bursting at the seams with beggared children. I’d seen desiccated little corpses left lying there where they died in the street, unable to find any sustenance for themselves. Some were Xema children, others were Hoa, and sooner or later I would be joining their ranks. The people at the House of Smiles talked grandly of the day we would “graduate,” but they couldn’t keep us from knowing about the harsh reality of what was waiting on the outside.
If I’d still been a soldier I would have been able to obtain food by raiding Hoa villages, but the problem was we’d had our AK-47s taken away from us. Even though the war was now over—or rather, because the war was now over—we’d been plunged into a world of misery and hunger.
Surprisingly enough, I wasn’t turfed out of the institute.
White men came. No—there had already been a few whites in the school. More accurate to say a new contingent arrived. They looked like doctors. A number of expensive-looking shiny black vans pulled up inside the grounds, and men in bright t-shirts and sunglasses poured out of them. The black vans had a large logo—a pretty cool design, if truth be told—plastered on their sides: “CMI.”
I’d forgotten the name of the doctor who I found standing right in front of me at that moment, but I remember he said that he’d come to heal our hearts. So he must’ve been a doctor.
“What’s CMI?” I asked, not even attempting to hide my wariness. “Are you anything to do with the SLF?”
“No, nothing to do with the SLF, son. Having said that, we’re not related to the SDA either,” the doctor answered calmly. “You used to be a soldier with the SDA, didn’t you?”
“What’s CMI?” I asked again. I didn’t want any more of his sympathy or pity. I was tired of talking about my life as a soldier. And I was sick of this casual, meaningless sympathy, given so freely and worth so little, from these people who never once in their life had had to worry about where their next meal was coming from.
“CMI stands for ‘Combat Medical Instruments.’ It’s English. If you translated it into your language, it would mean something like an organization for helping people with the problems they suffer from after battle.”
“Yeah, I speak English. Not difficult words, though.”
“Of course you do, son, forgive me. I see from your file you wanted to be a doctor? Your grades at school were top of the class too—you’re quite the bright young man, I can see.”
This blatant attempt at buttering me up pissed me off. “So what is it exactly that this CMI does?” I asked.
“Well, as I said, we try and help soldiers who have been hurt, in body and in mind. We also inoculate soldiers against anxiety and depression by giving them a little shot to the heart.”
“A shot to the heart …”
“That’s right. A jab, a shot. With the technology we have these days, we’re not just limited to administering our injections intravenously. We can also give a little shot straight to the heart.” The doctor looked into my eyes. “You’ll find out soon enough for yourself.”
Condescending fucker. Keeping things from me.
“So, why exactly have you CMI guys come here?” I asked.
When the doctor next spoke it was with the same calm tone of voice, but this time laced with a hint of pride and conviction. His voice now had the same determined quality as we’d had when we used to chant our SDA slogans. And I recognized that gleam in the eyes.
“We’re here to put a stop to war in this country once and for all.”
“The war’s already finished,” I said.
“Well, then. Let me ask you a question. Has the war finished for you?”
That stopped me short. Why was this doctor trying to stir things up, I wondered. The teachers here had been banging on about just the opposite. The era of hatred was over; the era of war was over. We weren’t supposed to hate anybody anymore. We weren’t supposed to kill anybody anymore either—that’s what they had told us. Even though these adults knew full well that our lives so far hadn’t exactly been picnics in the park, they had somehow managed to convince themselves that all they needed was to repeat these platitudes over and over, like a broken record, and all the bad things in our lives would somehow magically disappear. I wanted to stab the shit-spouting teachers over and over with a sharp knife, a scenario I’d daydreamed about many times. But externally I always ended up putting on a show—a brave face, stoically holding back my tears.
“All the people here say the war is over,” I said. I doubted that I sounded convinced, or convincing.
“All the people here don’t really believe that though, do they? Not for a second,” the doctor continued. “Surely you’ve worked that out for yourself by now?”
Perhaps it was Ndunga’s battlefield execution just after the end of the war that had stripped me of any illusions. I seem to remember agreeing tacitly, unquestioningly, with the captain’s pronouncement that protocol was protocol and that military order needed to be upheld. I was devastated that my friend had been killed, of course, but there was no denying that he had disobeyed a direct order. Regardless of whether the fighting was due to continue or not, the fact was that he had to be punished.
So that’s how the war ended. Five seconds before my best friend died.
At least, that’s what everyone kept on saying. That the war had ended. But, I wondered, how was I going to put an end to my own personal war?
Let me tell you how my war started.
I was on my way home from school, two rivers and a mountain away. Around the time I’d crossed the second river I noticed a plume of smoke rising from my village. As I got closer, the smell closed in on me. Not the usual smell of goat droppings or plants or animals, but a revolting stench. Before I knew it I had discarded my bookbag by the wayside, and I was running toward my village.
I stopped in my tracks at the entrance to the village to behold houses reduced to ashes and corpses scattered about the place. There were limbs piled up next to the chopping block where we cut our firewood, and the evil SLF were responsible. Later on I learned the full extent of what exactly they had done—after all, I ended up doing more or less the same thing myself to the other side. But at the time I couldn’t even register what the mound of severed arms and legs, piled up like so much kindling, even was.
Overcome with dread, I rushed like a lunatic toward the place where my house once stood.
So, first there was Mom. I wasn’t so concerned with the fact that her shirt was ripped to shreds and that her face had been beaten so badly it was a swollen mass. Mainly because she was prostrate and there was blood flowing copiously from the numerous open wounds on her back. The earth around her had drunk her blood and was stained reddish black. Next to her was Sis’s body. Or rather Sis’s corpse. My clever little sister Minnu. There was a bullet hole decorating her broad forehead. The SLF barbarians had repeatedly and mercilessly used her prepubescent body as a fucktoy. She wasn’t even ten years old. Unlike Mom, Sis had been stripped completely naked, and semen was still dribbling from her spread-eagled crotch.
I’m pretty sure I fainted right then and there. It was too much to take in.
I wonder how long I lay there unconscious next to the dead bodies of my family. Eventually, though, I heard some voices, men’s voices, register amidst the fog of my mind.
I still had no real idea what was going on, but I found myself gently propped up by a man in military fatigues. How ya holdin’ up, kid, he asked, and then something else: Sorry, if only we’d got here sooner we wouldn’t have let the SLF do this, get away with this.
The man held me up as I staggered out of the house to survey the scorched village. Mom was dead. Sis was dead. After having their las
t scraps of dignity ripped from them and after suffering more than any woman should ever have to suffer. Pop was gone too. Also killed, no doubt. M’tougwai from next door, who used to help me with my homework as if he were my brother, had his arms chopped off and his chest was riddled with bullets.
No one I had ever known was alive anymore.
And that’s how I became a soldier with the SDA. So that I could see to it that every last one of the SLF was annihilated.
“You’re absolutely right that a ceasefire has been declared, of course,” continued the white doctor. “The Dutch managed to get the SDA, the SLF, and the Government Forces to agree on that. Now, do you know what ‘DDR’ means?”
I shook my head.
“It stands for Disarmament, Demobilization, and Reintegration. Basically, it’s about getting former soldiers like you back into normal life. It’s a vital part of ensuring that a war is well and truly over.”
Bile rose up in me. DDR … particularly the last part of it. Reintegration … integration … Were we now supposed to somehow get along with the fucking Hoa? The words made me almost dry heave. Integration … If it came down to it I’d rather go down, AK-47 blazing, taking as many of those little shits down with me as I could before the police ended me. Rather that than be “integrated.”
The doctor carried on speaking, blithely oblivious to the rage that was seething inside me. “So, let’s see. The decommissioning of the weapons has started properly, hasn’t it? You were given a sledgehammer so that you could destroy your AK-47 with your own hands, weren’t you? And then you were freed from the army.”