The young man who was attending his first literary reading said that it was fascinating, he was enjoying himself very much, but the way he said it made his new girlfriend wonder whether he was telling the truth, and anyway how could you enjoy something that was so sad, even if you couldn’t follow the exact words?
Prof. Ziegler scratched the inside of her thigh, although it was not really itchy any more, and then turning to survey the room behind her caught the eye of an old student of hers a few rows back. He mouthed an enquiry after her health and she smiled and nodded and mouthed that she was fine, fine.
Andrij Leonenko took out a small red notebook with a spiral binding, turned to a clean page and, shielding it from view with his free hand, jotted down a phrase that had come to him ten minutes earlier and might be the first line of a poem: ‘You read with your eyes closed.’
Horst Grundmann leant over to his wife Sylvia and asked her whether she had remembered to let Bertram know about Thursday, and she said yes, he’d said it was no problem. And then he leant to the other side and said to Florence that Maryam had read superbly, and Florence said yes, it had been very good.
Rolf Backer, the commissioning editor from Kleinbach, a tall man who usually covered his shaven head with a soft felt hat that made him feel (and he hoped look) like a writer himself, but which he had checked at the cloakroom out of consideration for the people sitting behind him, remarked to his companion Theo van Roosbroeck, a Belgian political theorist who had written about the militia in the Democratic Republic of Congo, that Akello was a brave girl, and Theo replied that she was pretty too, although she’d had the stuffing knocked out of her, understandably so, and they agreed that it was a terrible thing that had happened to her, but that she’d overcome adversity in a way that was truly inspiring. To himself, Theo noted that people in Europe were tired of stories like this, sad as they were, and wondered whether his friend Rolf might not find it easier to market someone who gave the impression of being less resigned to her fate.
Three people who had other arrangements for the evening and one who’d decided he’d had enough listening for one day slipped out of their rows, excuse me, thank you, and headed for the exits. Two people immediately put something – a coat, a spindled programme – on the empty seats to discourage someone else from sitting there. The student who had been leaning against the wall at the back quickly took the nearest vacated seat with nothing on it, noted that the shiny plastic still retained the imprint of the departed backside, and for that reason did not like the residual warmth she felt through the fabric of her skirt.
The poet Leonenko took out his notebook for the second time and wrote ‘Reader, open your eyes’ and after that a question mark in a circle, like a copyright notice. Earlier that week, his very first poem had been accepted for publication in Die Horen and his editor there had told him not to be scared to write things down. Every poem started with a single word.
Meanwhile Hans Günther Basch passed behind Maryam Akello, who had taken her seat again at the table. He reached out to squeeze her shoulder, in passing, but thought better of it at the last moment and instead squeezed the cushion of her chair. He put his copy of Zucker down on the lectern with the passages he intended to read flagged in yellow. He raised the microphone stand, and then dropped it and raised it again, as if he were measuring the difference in their heights, and then he puffed into the mesh bauble once. He took off his glasses and put them in the breast pocket of his jacket. His reading glasses with their pointy Brechtian frames were already hanging around his neck on a chain. He waited for the room to settle.
Without his glasses, the room looked shapeless and steamy. He thought he saw Horst and Sylvia with their heads together, and then Maryam in the front row. No, of course, it couldn’t be Maryam who was on the podium, it was Anya. No, no, not Anya, what was he thinking? Anya was in the book, she was dead, or rather translated from the dead. It was Florence.
Of the one hundred and forty-five people who happened to be watching Hans Günther then, eleven noticed the momentary bewilderment that crossed his face as he glanced at Maryam Akello and then at the audience, tucking in his chin as if he were afraid of being hit, and they put it down to nerves or irritation at how long the room was taking to come to order.
He remembered sitting at his kitchen table a few days after Maryam’s visit, with the manuscript open beside his laptop, inputting the revisions they had discussed. He was working through the grimmest passage in the book – it was among those he was about to read – where she described the murder of her sister. This had to be perfect. Even after every second word had been changed and changed again, he wondered whether the tone was right, whether he had captured the original, whether the depths of feeling in it had found some resonance in his own language. As he turned to a new page of the manuscript, he saw a note in red ink. No one but Maryam had touched these pages: she must have written it while he was out of the room. He looked closer. She had added a line in the last paragraph about the sugar. There were his questions in pencil: Is this really what you want to say? Did your English translator understand properly? Is there not a softer phrase? There was the note in blue ink he had written to himself in German at the end of the discussion, when she appeared to agree with him that some things were better left unsaid. And then there was this new line, her final word on the subject, written in blood in the narrow margin. A judgement.
An expectant hush drew him back into the present. For a moment the silent room felt like a clearing in the forest, cloven in two by the shimmering stream of the aisle. He became aware of the heads of the audience like moss-covered rocks, and the thoughts condensed above them like mist in the early morning, and then the trees beyond the window, receding into the dark. With both hands, he lifted the dangling glasses from his chest, placed them squarely before his eyes, and began.
I am in the middle now. In the beginning, when we walked, the ropes that keep us joined together pulled tight and every few paces one of us nearly fell or dropped the box or bundle she was carrying. In the beginning? It was only yesterday. Today we are moving like a creature with a supple spine and many arms and legs. They said we would soon learn to cooperate and we have. The reason is simple: they will kill us if we don’t. Drop the sorghum, the bullets, the radio and you will be cut loose like a vine. They will not waste a shot on you. We have learnt to keep so close together that there is slack in the ropes even when we clamber over rocks or slide down cuttings.
Yesterday, Anya was behind me. But last night they split us into two groups and this morning they tied us differently. Now she is right in front and I am in the middle. Between the two of us, the girl called Amito and a boy who never speaks and does not yet have a name. Behind me, our neighbour from Atiak, and then her niece, and then the other boy, the one who called out to Amito when the Commander took her away to the fire last night. I think he may be her brother and his name is Kidega.
Perhaps I could learn to tell us apart by the different sounds we make. Amito’s skirt is full and starchy and it makes a different sound to my own, which has been worn soft by washing. The Atiak neighbour swallows the air with a rasp as if its edges are sharp. I also hear the pad of our soles on the path and the creaking of the boxes and bags we carry on our heads, like the sound a cow makes as it moves. Under it all, my heart beating, setting the pace. It would be pleasant, almost a kind of walking music, if things were different, if we were somewhere else and not here with these men.
They make a noise of their own. I hear their heels striking the ground, the clinking of buckles, the stock of a rifle tapping against a button, water sloshing in bottles. If we are an animal, they are a machine, some heavy weapon we have to drag along.
There are seven of them too, one for each of us, although that is the wrong way to put it because it is no more than a coincidence. One of them could subdue us. They have guns and boots and we do not even have shoes. They are men and we are children. Anya is the eldest, I think, and she is not even eighteen yet
. Perhaps they planned to capture more of us? That would explain why they are so angry. If we were twice as many, they could kill a few of us to teach the others a lesson. But now they have to take care of us or the whole business will be for nothing.
I can hardly tell which one is which. They keep changing places and they look the same in their uniforms and berets. One of them has a beard, and one has sunglasses with pink frames, and one of them is the Commander. Also I cannot look too hard, because when Kidega, the boy who may be Amito’s brother, looked at the Commander this morning, he hit him in the face and told him to keep his eyes on the Lord.
Mostly, I watch Anya, to give myself courage. I am glad she is in front of me. Once, when the path turned sharply, she looked at me just for a moment. It was the kind of look she would give me when Father was angry about something silly and there was no point in arguing with him. That one look was like a whole conversation. Since then, I have been watching the curve of her shoulder, the muscle in her arm raised to steady the box, the way her calves flex as she walks, and I know she is telling me something. Be strong.
Hans Günther Basch took a deep breath and put his thumb on the yellow Post-it that marked the second passage he meant to read. The audience’s attention had been drifting between the reader and the writer, settling now on Basch, telling the story, now on Akello, who had lived it and was perhaps reliving it, although her expression remained remote, which made it difficult for them to picture her in the role. The sticky note got caught on Basch’s forefinger and he lost his place. There was a silence, given texture by some scuffing and coughing, while he leafed through the book in search of the passage he had marked. Just a brief section, but important, if one was to convey the story. The attention converged on him and cohered. In the instant before it fell apart, he found the pencilled bracket at the start of the paragraph and went on.
When I awake, the bearded one is standing over me, with his boots pressed to my thighs, pinning me to the ground by the cloth of my skirt. He blots out the firelight, the branches of the trees grow out of his body like thorny, crooked arms. Then the sky falls on me and I am choking on the bristle-brush hairs of his chest and the fabric of his shirt, which smells of smoke and sweat. The earth swallows me. Just as I am sinking into the darkness, he rises up and my hips lift off the ground, and then his head burrows into my belly and rolls from side to side, as if he is wiping his mouth on me. He blows out hot breath and spit, and then he pulls away again and drops me on the ground. Without a word, he goes to Anya, unthreads her from the rest of us like a bead from a string and takes her away. She doesn’t make a sound.
Another line had come into Leonenko’s head, the line ‘Reader, close your eyes’, and he thought of writing it down in the red notebook, but the fact that Hans Günther Basch was looking straight at him, or so it seemed, made it impossible.
Horst Grundmann thought his friend Hans Günther looked a little feverish and wondered whether he was coming down with something, or whether perhaps he’d been hitting the bottle; he used to have that problem, although everyone thought he was on the wagon these days.
The young man who was attending his first reading wondered if there was surfing in Zanzibar. He had seen something about snorkelling there on television, but he had always wanted to learn to surf. Perhaps he would ask her during question time. She was from that part of the world.
Prof. Ziegler remembered that the former student who was sitting a few rows behind her had written a very interesting thesis on the use of the mask in Greek tragedy in relation to self-dramatisation and the stylisation of emotion in the contemporary media, and she thought she should collar him afterwards and ask if he had finished that article based on his research. They had one slot to fill in the Spring edition of Exeunt.
Rolf Backer, the editor at Kleinbach, remembered the annual sales conference which was coming up and the spreadsheets on his computer at the office with their breakdowns of typesetting costs, marketing plans, review copies and sales projections, and the report from the distribution agency about book shops closing down, even in Leipzig, and how the ebook was the way to go, and he put his head in his hands and began to massage his scalp.
The student who had come in late and had to stand for the first half of the reading, but who was now sitting directly behind Rolf Backer, stared at his fingers as they prodded the rubbery pink skin of his scalp, which he had shaved that morning, the fingertips sunk in the flesh and shifting it around on the bone, forcing it into ridges and ripples, stretching out the long, furrowed crease that ran down into the collar of his jacket, and she could not look away even though the sight of it made her queasy.
There were no flies on Maryam Akello, Rolf was thinking. She’d had the sense to go to live in America. All the good African writers were in America or England. It was a big plus on the marketing side.
Hans Günther ran his eye down the passage he was about to read. How to speak these words? This was the inspiring part; it was painful but uplifting. It had given the book its title and had already been extracted in one of the papers. A few people in the audience were sure to be familiar with it. He must do it justice.
I keep the days in my pocket. Each day is a stone and so far there are only three of them, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. It is easy to hold three days in your head, but it will not be easy in a week or a month.
The Commander has warned us not to complain about walking or carrying. Get used to it, he says, you will be doing it for a long time. If you cannot go on, you will be killed. The choice is yours.
He also says: You have come too far to find your way home. Which way will you go? What will you eat? Think how much harder it will be in two weeks’ time. Then it will be impossible to run away. We won’t even bother to tie you.
I turn the stones over and press one against the palm of my hand with my little finger. This hollow one is Thursday. Yesterday.
Yesterday I was glad that Anya was walking in front of me. I felt that she was showing me the way. Today I wish she was behind me, so I did not have to see the blood and ash on the back of her dress. She is like a smudged drawing. I hardly recognise the lines of her body.
Today, Friday, is a round pebble, perfectly smooth except for a thin, rough seam around its middle. When I picked it up I saw that it was dark, almost black, with a yellowish vein running through it like fat in a piece of meat.
I keep the days in one pocket. I keep the sugar in the other.
This morning, something glistened on my wrist and when I passed it over my lips I tasted sugar. Reaching to the top of the bag on my head, I pushed my finger into the fold and found that it has pulled open there. The gap is just wide enough for the tip of a thumb and forefinger. A pinch of sweetness.
It is our sugar. It belongs to my family. The soldiers took it from our larder when they took us. Just as they took the sack of sorghum that Amito is carrying from her mother’s kitchen. It gives me a purpose here. I am watching over our things.
Mother was always so careful with the sugar. Waste not, want not. You had to be sure not to spill a single grain opening a new bag. Some sugar might be caught in the folds of the paper.
I steady the bag with one hand, reach into the opening and pinch a few grains between my fingers. After a few paces I raise the sugar to my lips. Sweetness. And sweat.
We are in the open now, following a path along the grassy ridge of a hill. It was a relief to come out from under the trees. It is hotter here but the path is open and that makes the carrying easier. I worry about Anya. She has stumbled a few times even though the path is good. She is carrying the box with the bullets, the heaviest thing even though it is made of plastic, even heavier than the radio. They gave it to her because she is the tallest. I watch her back but it says nothing. Perhaps the sugar feels lighter because it is sweet? We have eaten nothing but scraps since we left Atiak. When we pass a mango tree they will not let us pick the fruit.
I am taking sugar for this evening. I had the idea to hide some in my
pocket as we walk, so that tonight when we are tied up together I can share it with Anya. I must be careful not to let them see what I am doing or to tear the opening in the bag. If they think I have stolen from them, they will kill me. Even though the sugar is actually mine.
I look for a landmark on the path ahead, a dead tree or an anthill, and wait until we are there before I reach into the bag again.
The first pinch turns to syrup on my fingertips. I have to wipe the sweat off my palm on the hem of my skirt and try again. This time I manage to carry a pinch of sugar to my pocket, but then I can’t be sure it is still there. Perhaps it fell into the stitching of the seam and my poking finger pushed it deeper or melted it to nothing. I must be patient.
We walk all morning. It is Friday, a black pebble with a vein of yellow fat in it, which no tongue will ever taste. Stone, sugar. Once Amito says that she cannot go on and sinks down under the sack, but they shout at her until she gets up again. One of the younger soldiers, he is no older than me, hits her on the shoulder with the flat side of his panga. Let me kill this one, he shouts. But the Commander says, Then who will carry this sack?
At midday, they let us drink from a stream they have muddied with their boots. They eat cold porridge from the night before, from the hollow belly of Thursday, and we get the crusts scraped from the bottom of the pot. There are stalks of grass or tobacco in mine but I swallow it just like that.
The niece of the neighbour from Atiak does not eat. She cries softly. Her heels are bleeding. She is from town and not used to walking. We are used to walking at home, but not this far, carrying such heavy things, without rest. My feet are also swollen. Anya and I kneel down together at the stream to drink and I try to show her how sorry I am but she will not meet my eye.
We go on. I feed my pocket. There is a little store of sugar there now. I stop myself from checking how much. For all I know it is only a pinch, but I imagine a spoonful or a cupful. I imagine scooping it out in a cupped hand. Tonight, when they pile the provisions together and tie us up under a tree or on the bed of a stream, I hope Anya and I are close together. Once the others are asleep, I’ll whisper in her ear and tell her to lick her finger and press it into my pocket.
101 Detectives Page 12