The Child's Elephant

by Rachel Campbell-Johnston

  ‘Line up!’ Lobo bawled.

  The children jostled about confusedly as he forced them into some sort of file.

  ‘I’m your commander,’ the man told them. His eyes crawled down the line, drilling into each of the frightened little faces in turn. ‘From now on you will know me only by that name. From now on what I tell you will immediately be done. My second-in-command here’ – he pointed to Lobo – ‘will make sure of that. Now fall in!’

  And so the military training began: a programme of exercise and hardship and discipline so relentless that it drove every thought except that of their next breath from the children’s brains. They had to run and keep running until every muscle screamed for rest; to lie and keep lying until the ants trailed over their skin; to squat and stay squatting until every sinew was groaning; to obey orders as instinctively as they would have swatted a fly.

  The sun blazed down on Bat’s newly shaven scalp as he marched on the spot, up and down, up and down, until the sweat streamed from his face, neck and back and the insects that blundered against him got stuck. He felt thirsty and giddy and sick. But there was no respite.

  ‘You must act as one person,’ the commander yelled.

  If the children flagged, they were beaten. If they fell behind, they were beaten. If they failed to act fast enough on an order, they were beaten. Sometimes it was the commander or Lobo who exacted the penalty, striking the elbows, knees or ankles with a stick. But it was worse when it was another child who was chosen to do the beating; when a soldier was forced to turn on his or her fellow sufferer.

  If they didn’t strike hard enough, they would get a beating themselves. Bat dreaded the moment when he would be ordered to hurt Muka. What would he do on the day when her spirit flared up? Would he be able to punish her? His mind winced from the thought. Could your spirit break like a bone? he wondered. He suspected that Lobo also was waiting to find that out. Sometimes he would see his eyes flickering between him and Muka, narrowing cannily as he waited and watched.

  Days passed into nights; but Bat, who now slept in a line of boys under a palm shelter, was almost too weary to notice the difference between them. ‘The army is like a machine,’ the commander would tell them. ‘You are parts of a whole. If one of you doesn’t function, the whole mechanism will fail.’ At the bark of an order they had to be up and ready, forgetting tiredness and hunger as they were drilled back and forth until each was so alert to the movements of the one standing beside him that the merest tensing of a muscle was enough to elicit a response. Over and over they went through their routines until after a while, Bat came almost not to mind it. At least it helped to distract him; at least he felt too exhausted to do anything other than what he was told.

  He came to prefer the marching to the times when the commander would have them dragged from their sleep in the middle of the night. Then they would be made to stand in a line, still as the statues on a wood-carver’s stall, while flying things whined around their faces and bit. The commander, planted straddle-legged before them for what started to feel like for ever, would talk. On and on he would go. Sometimes his voice was rough edged and menacing, sometimes it softened and sounded almost cajoling in the dark.

  ‘Our job is a serious one,’ he told them. ‘We are not like those government soldiers who fight for whoever pays them. We are here for the people. We have the gods on our side. We kill those who deserve it. The gods want it. It’s for the good of this nation. We are fighting against unfairness. We are fighting for peace.’

  The words drummed into his brain like a tribal beat in the blood, until sometimes Bat found himself almost believing they were true.

  ‘We are here to protect you. We are your family. We will fight alongside you when the rest have gone,’ the commander assured them.

  ‘Sometimes I think that he cares,’ Bat whispered to Gulu one evening as they crouched together on the outermost fringes of the fire. A tree hyrax was roasting and they had been drawn to the flames by the rich drift of its smell. But they dared go no closer. The child leaders, the ones with the long matted dreadlocks who had been in the army so long that they now commanded their own squads of child soldiers, were the only ones who were allowed to get up close to the warmth, to take the choice morsels as soon as they were ready.

  ‘Don’t believe him,’ muttered Gulu. ‘You can’t trust anyone here . . . not even yourself.’

  As if to prove it, at that moment, a fight broke out. It was between two of the leaders who by now Bat recognized. One they called the Thief because, it was said, he could purloin pretty much anything. The other was nicknamed the Goat because he disliked getting wet. He wore a camouflage jacket with long sleeves and a wide grubby collar from which his sinewy neck poked. He looked like a child who had put on his father’s clothes, Bat thought. But there was nothing childlike about his outburst.

  ‘I’ll kill you! I’ll cut you up into pieces. I’ll slice off your lips,’ he screamed, leaping in fury at the Thief, who had just taken the last morsel of bush meat from its spit. The watchers scattered like clouds of tiny fish in a stream. A knife flashed through the firelight. The Goat made a grab and, securing his prize, drove his snarling rival back off with the blade. He gnawed on his gristly morsel as he watched the loser retreat, eyes glowing, sullen as a beaten hyena.

  ‘And they are friends,’ whispered Gulu. ‘Friends are dangerous things to have in this camp. You can’t trust.’

  ‘But I trust you,’ Bat murmured.

  ‘Don’t,’ Gulu snapped. ‘Friendships only bring trouble. Your allegiance is to the army. And the commander is always on the watch.’

  ‘But Muka?’ Bat faltered. ‘I will always trust Muka.’

  ‘Then guard your secret,’ Gulu hissed. ‘You will only be forced to betray her. There are informers among the children. They are starving. They will sell you for the price of a chicken leg.’

  Bat believed him. He had seen the older soldiers snatching food from the fists of the youngest. They would sit grinning and eating while the little ones tried not to sob.

  ‘We have to pretend not to like each other,’ he whispered to Muka three days later, drawing her into the shadows beyond the ring of firelight. Behind them, at the fringes of the forest, he could see one of the sentinels who were always left on guard watching them, but he had to take this opportunity to speak. They could so seldom be together outside training times. Where he and Gulu slept among boys huddled under a palm-leaf shelter, Muka was kept always on the girls’ side of the camp.

  ‘We have to pretend that each of us is angry with the other,’ Bat urged Muka; ‘that each blames the other for having been caught. We can’t afford for them to talk of us in the same breath.’

  ‘But what about Lobo?’ the girl replied. Her question was almost a whimper. ‘If he thinks that you hate me . . .’ Her voice straggled off, but Bat knew what she meant. He had seen the way that Lobo strutted when he knew she was watching, the way he constantly monitored through narrowed eyelids. He knew why her lips now quivered. He watched her struggle for self-possession.

  ‘It’s so hard,’ she faltered. ‘I don’t know if I can manage without you. You don’t know what it’s like. There was one girl I spoke to in my first days here,’ she whispered, ‘who had been snatched from her village with her sister. The little one was only eight but she was forced to march all day with a huge sack of flour on her head; to walk and to walk until she was too tired to go any further, until she was wailing so much that one of the child leaders flew into a rage. “If you’re so tired, let’s give you a rest,” he said and he struck her on the head with the handle of his panga. She fell to the ground and never got up. And now her sister who was with me has gone too. She left the camp with the commander. I don’t know why. All I saw were the tears shining on her face as she left. And then I was glad, so glad, to know that I still had you with me,’ Muka whispered, ‘and though I tried to wish that you hadn’t been captured, that you hadn’t run back to find me, I was so glad that you had
. At least together, I thought, we could find a way to escape. But how can we do that if we can’t speak to each other, how can we do that . . .’ Her voice broke into a sob. The sudden sense of abandonment was overwhelming her, bringing the girl who had been so strong to a breaking point.

  Bat watched the feelings that flickered across her shadowy face. He could read them almost as clearly as if she had spoken aloud and, unable to bear it, he reached out.

  But Muka, steeling herself, jumped up and, stepping rapidly backwards, turned on her heel.

  ‘Muka!’ Bat cried. Two other children turned at the noise. But all they saw was the girl stalking stiffly away and Bat, his hand still half lifted, following her with his eyes. Lobo glided over. He too was now studying them, his eyes thin as slits. Bat let his hand drop and just stared into the night.

  That was the last time he and Muka would let anyone see any contact between them, he thought. And though often in the days that followed they would exchange secret glances, they were warily alert whenever anyone was watching. They stalked stiffly about each other as a pair of village dogs. At first, tired and hungry, the loneliness tormented them; but it was strange, Bat realized one morning as he stole a slantwise look at his friend: the feigned distance was starting to make them feel all the more close.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  One day the children were all given weapons. Anything served: hoes, sharpened stakes, knives, pangas or spears. They were made to lie on their bellies and crawl forward with their elbows until an order was given. Then they had to run onward as fast as they could and attack a banana palm that drooped faintly at the fringes of the camp.

  ‘Imagine that tree is your enemy,’ the commander barked. ‘Imagine that it’s coming to get you. If you don’t kill it now it will kill you . . . or far worse.’

  The children stabbed, sliced and pierced. If they didn’t look fierce enough, the commander sent them back.

  ‘Is that how you would kill your enemy?’ he bellowed. ‘That’s pathetic. Let me show you how it’s done.’ And unslinging his rifle, he uttered a bloodcurdling shriek and leaped forward. ‘The neck! The stomach! The heart!’ he screamed. A bayonet blade flashed as it flew in and out. The veins in his neck swelled, tight as the cords around a tugging cow. His sweat broke out in beads. ‘I would slaughter it before it slaughtered me,’ he panted as he wiped his weapon clean with a torn banana leaf. ‘Remember you are in the army now. You are the sworn enemy of the government soldiers, of the people who give them shelter, of the villagers who won’t join you; of everyone but your fellow fighter at your side.’

  The children lunged at the palm, this time with a renewed vigour. If they didn’t please the commander, they wouldn’t be allowed to eat. They would have to stand at the side and watch while the others were fed, their bellies growling as the hunger gnawed deeper into their guts.

  A few days later they were all handed guns. Bat had never held one before. His hand trembled. The commander glowered at the group. ‘It seems that you all have two things in common,’ he sneered. ‘You are afraid to look a man in the eye and you are afraid to hold a weapon. Your hands are shaking as if that gun was held to your head. Well, it soon will be,’ he snapped, ‘if you don’t learn fast.’ He paced up and down the line, searching their faces with his bloodshot eyes. His cheek muscles bulged. ‘This gun’ – he held it high above his head – ‘will soon belong to you. So you better not be scared of it. It will soon be your best friend. You will look a man straight in the eye and you won’t tremble. You will pull the trigger and laugh. Our salvation lies here where our ancestors have always known they must seek it: it lies in the barrel of a gun.’

  ‘Ignore the safety catch,’ the commander told the children; ‘it will only slow you down.’ He showed them how to raise their new weapons, to wedge the butt hard and shove their cheeks against the stock. Two of the little ones weren’t strong enough to support it. They had to lie it down on a piece of wood. Bat gripped the barrel tight with his left hand and, with his right forefinger on the trigger, squinted down the gun’s length. Things looked impossibly small as he lined up the sight. A row of bottles had been set out at the far side of the clearing. Bat squeezed. The kick hurt his thin shoulder. Everything felt a long way away. Everything felt distant – even his own thoughts. It was as if he was looking at himself down the barrel of a rifle. He felt as brittle as the bottles which leaped upwards before falling, tumbling to the ground in a glitter of shards. That night, he couldn’t sleep. His ears rang with the gunshot. The smell of cordite stained his breath. He could taste it whenever he tried to swallow. It was the taste of his new life. It was the taste of death.

  It was chilly at night when the sun went down and the children all slept in a line on thin scraps of plastic, the thirty-two boys on one side of the camp, the seven girls on the other. At night they would often scream out in their dreams. They would wake sweating and shaking, with racing fears and wild eyes.

  Bat shared a blanket with Gulu. The boy had almost recovered, though he had lost a front tooth and, despite all his best attempts to disguise it, he now walked with a limp. The tiny child who had brought them food when they were shut in the hut slept on his other side. He was called La, Bat now knew, but it was not the boy himself who had told him. He never spoke. ‘Not because he can’t,’ Gulu told Bat, ‘but because he doesn’t want to. Only the commander can draw a sound from his lips. Kindness is useless; only fear now works.’

  But sometimes, late at night, Bat would hear La whispering to a bushbaby that he kept in his pocket. It came out at twilight and sat on his hand, swivelling its head and cuffing the backs of its ears. When the patrol swept their bodies at night with the beam of a torch, its eyes would glow orange as embers in the light. Then Bat would fall asleep dreaming of the days when he had lain alongside his elephant. He would imagine the sound of her heartbeat, like the far-off rolling of thunder, as strong and as powerful as the heartbeat of the world.

  During the day, the camp was mostly empty. Only the trainees and a couple of sentinels stayed behind, loitering in the shade at the fringe of the trees, waving their guns about as casually as a herd boy waves his switch. Bat wasn’t sure if they were there to keep the rebel soldiers in or the government soldiers out. He suspected the former. Sometimes he caught them staring at him, as if they knew what he was thinking; knew that every time his eyes strayed towards the fringes of the compound he was wondering whether he could escape, whether he could find his way home through that wilderness of trees. The guards would tense and lay their hands on the stocks of their guns.

  Only the trained child soldiers were trusted to go looking for food. ‘They lay traps,’ Gulu explained to Bat as they lay under their blanket one night. ‘They dig pits for the bush pigs to stumble into and set snares for hyrax and squirrels. They prise the porcupines out of their holes. It’s easier to get them once they’ve lumbered down their burrows because then their spines can’t stand up. But even out in the open they’ll risk their sharp quills. Porcupine meat is the fattest in the jungle, and when they come back they will fight over who has the feet.’

  The soldiers in training were never given such tender morsels. Grown thin on a diet of millet porridge, they had to hunt lizards and grasshoppers instead. When the gristly stews were prepared, they dipped their handfuls of goo eagerly into its gravy. They didn’t care if their fingers got burned. They were too hungry to mind about that.

  One day Lobo killed a chimpanzee with a slingshot. Its flesh was dark and rich and the smell of it roasting drew the children into a circle of glittering eyes.

  ‘Here, it’s for you,’ Lobo beckoned, and held out a steaming hunk to Muka. His cheeks dimpled with a smile. ‘Take it,’ he said, reaching out cautiously, as if he was reaching to a stray dog that might bite. He saw the girl hesitate. ‘You only have to ask me if you want anything,’ he encouraged. ‘We are from the same village. I’ll always help you.’

  Muka vacillated for a moment. Her stomach was churning with hunger
. She let her eyes drop. The lopped-off hand of the chimpanzee was lying, cupped like the palm of a pleading market beggar, in the dust. Her face flinched as she backed off.

  Lobo shrugged. ‘One day you’ll be glad I am so patient,’ he muttered, and stalked stiffly away with an over-confident swagger, cuffing a small boy across the ear as he passed. His eyes vanished into the thick furrows of his frown, but later he was laughing as he and the commander returned to the fire and, squatting beside it, ate the liver and heart smoking-hot. The children stared round-eyed with yearning as they chewed.

  The only time the children ate well was when the older soldiers had returned from a raid. They would be away for days, and all the while the trainees would wait, longing for them to come back with corn cobs and pumpkins and the carcasses of slaughtered goats; with sticks of sugar cane which they sucked down to dry fibre and the biscuits which they tore at, scattering wrappers across the clearing. Once, the raiders even brought back a thin dun cow. For a while it had stood there, tethered short in the compound, gazing with mild interest at the alien forest; and then it had been shot. Bat thought of his own cattle as he watched it crumpling to its knees. He let their names reel through his head in a list: Kayo and Leko; Toco and Tara; freckled Anecanec and the restless Bwaro. For a moment it steadied him; but then he remembered the silvery Kila and the memory was no longer a comfort to him.

  The child leaders squabbled and yapped, ferocious as wild dogs, as they dashed to cut up the carcass. Bat was scared of them. Their skins were marked like a map of all they had gone through. The Goat had great welts on his arm from the swipe of a panga that, in a battle with a villager, he had tried to fend off. The Thief had a hard, puckered burr in the skin of his back where a government bullet had entered his flesh. But the worst scars, Bat thought, were the invisible ones. When he looked into the eyes of these child leaders, he would see that they were dead. And yet it was they – they who bore the brands of the army not just on their bodies but inside their heads – who ruled the camp.