Song for Night

by Chris Abani

  I approach the containers. Buried under them in a metal box is a cache of food we left here. It is probably bad, but it’s worth trying. Like a chicken, I scratch in the dirt under it until I pull out the metal box that used to house the rounds for the M60 machine gun we had mounted on the roof of the bombed-out truck. There are several tins of food and I quickly drive my knife through the top of one lid into the soft meat inside. Even as I do it I think it is stupid that I didn’t check to see if the contents were booby-trapped. If the cache had been disturbed it would be impossible to tell because the ground was old.

  There is no booby-trap, no explosion, just the sweet taste of stale sardines in olive oil filling my mouth, my knife still embedded in the smile of the woman on the tin. Queen of the Coast, it says.

  I have happy memories about this place. We spent a long time here, hiding out from the war, being teenagers, and in that forest idyll, the change the war had wrought on us seemed very subtle. When we first stumbled on this oasis, the rain had collected in a seasonal pond and we lived in the burned-out trucks and armored vehicles, feeding on the forest’s grace and swimming in the pond. Ijeoma and I lived as a couple in the back of the old ambulance, making love with desperation tinged with the foreknowledge of loss. If we could have, we would have waited out the war here We didn’t want to move on, didn’t want to press on to the front. We weren’t stupid and we were certainly no longer idealistic. We only moved forward when we were forced to. It was the systematic strafing campaign aimed at flushing out rebel soldiers hiding in the forest, a campaign that rained bombs on us, turning the forest into an inferno that made us leave. When we headed off, it was in the direction I have just come from.

  I look around a little confused that there is no evidence of the bombing. The forest is lush and green. Is it possible that it grew back so fully so quickly? Things are off and I can’t quite place why. It’s like having something stuck in my teeth just out of reach of my tongue: irritating. What’s the use of hurrying things; it will come when it comes. I have other things to worry about, things more concrete.

  I fall asleep under the truck I’ve been digging by, while all around a gentle rain falls, and I don’t dream of the child’s head; in the distance heavy artillery fire approaches. But for now I sleep.

  Full of fish.

  Love Is a Backhanded Stroke

  to the Cheek

  It is a curious experience—to be inside your dream and outside it, lucid and yet sleeping deeply. But in this war so much has happened to make even this seem normal. I dream of Ijeoma and the night I lost my virginity to her. It is true that I had already had sex by then: John Wayne had forced me to rape someone, but that didn’t count. That was sex, rape, this was love; this was choice.

  I cannot even tell if this is how it happened or whether my dream is some kind of wish fulfillment. It is the same day John Wayne forced me to rape that woman, and afterwards, while the others gather around a fire to roast a goat, Ijeoma takes me to the river. It is dark down here and I can barely make out her face. She makes me sit by the water and she washes my feet and my face, then she strips off and dives into the water. I watch her move through the dark fluid like it is a second skin. My breath catches in my throat, way back, so it is hard to breathe.

  “Come in,” she calls.

  I am scared of the dark water and cannot. I know I will die if I get in, but my fear is so irrational I don’t even speak it. I just shake my head.

  “Coward,” she says, splashing me.

  I laugh and get up. I strip as though I am about to get in the water but I don’t. I sit back down on the dew-damp grass and feel it tickle my skin. This is sensual yet childlike, free and unconcerned. While I don’t feel innocent, and even though I no longer know what that can mean, it seems attainable. Suddenly Ijeoma is standing over me and I look up. In the faint light I see her body—the womanly swell of her hips belying the small buds on her chest. Her skin is wrinkled from the cold water and she is dripping water onto me, each drop falling slowly and with a touch that burns, but I cannot wait for the next drop. She kneels and kisses me. I close my eyes and lose myself in the damp moment. Later, we are dressing and she turns smiling and says: “You should stop fighting now.”

  I don’t know what it means. I want to ask her but I can feel myself waking up.

  Listening Is a Hand Cupping

  an Ear like a Seashell

  Daylight comes like rust corroding night. It is cool from last night’s rain and I stretch slowly, rested for the first time in months. I roll out from under the truck and walk the perimeter of the old camp, peeing as I go, stopping only to scratch my balls. Returning to the truck I slept under, I fish out a can of beans, bayonet it open, and spoon it cold with the tip of my knife. I have to move on. If the voices I just heard are enemy soldiers, they will soon be here.

  I search through the cabs and backs of the trucks for any kind of bag. It seems like a good idea to pack some food for the road—and maybe some loot that I can trade for favors. There is nothing. I leave the armored vehicles for last, afraid to jump into their dark bellies. I feel like the pygmy on the elephant hunt who has to cut into the beast and push past organs to cut out its heart, thereby declaring it an open feast.

  Not that I have ever seen a pygmy or even an elephant, except at the zoo before the war. I must have heard it somewhere, maybe I saw it in a documentary in school. Absently I wonder whether the animals in the zoo have been eaten in the food shortages. The thought of lions and giraffes clubbed to death for meat upsets me. If Ijeoma were here, she would say my feelings are irrational. She would say I am just homesick.

  “It’s not the animals you mourn,” she would say. “It is your home.”

  The voice in my head is loud enough to make me look around, half expecting to see her. Apart from the toads I can hear in the muddy bottom of the near empty pond, I am alone.

  Plucking up courage, I jump inside the first armored car and root around. Nothing. Gaining the light again, I sit on top and smoke a cigarette. There on the barrel of the gun is a bright red knit bag. How could I have missed it? I smoke and watch it for a while, almost as if it is a mirage.

  When I was a boy, my mother taught me how to crochet. I loved it. The way one knot would slip into another and another until the thread spread into a wide but strong web, while the steel crocked needle, like a shepherd’s stave, flashed. I used to imagine I was God, and the doily or cap I was knitting was a world, and the flash of the needle was lightning doing my bidding, spreading life like a primal shiver of fire.

  My father was alive then and he didn’t mind. He saw it as a harmless distraction, one that in fact presented the opportunity of a metaphor for him teaching me the Koran, the suras learned stitch by stitch—there is no God but Allah; hook and stitch; and Mohammed is his true prophet; circle with the wool; blessings be upon his name; pull needle through and loop. He was a gentle man, my father the imam. But my uncle, the distant relative who arrived when my father died and claimed my mother as his wife in the name of some old custom, hated me and he hated that I didn’t play the rough games like other boys. He beat me so bad; and my mother watched, afraid or unable to help, I wasn’t sure why, but I hated her for it. Why would she let this goat possess her? One day she showed me the crawl space in the ceiling, and I would hide up there for hours crocheting, wrapped around the wooden beams, building one huge web that became a hammock, became a shelter.

  Tossing the cigarette, I jump down, grab the bag, and stuff it full of tins of food, all well past their sell-by dates. I also stuff in cartons of cigarettes, some cheap plastic lighters, some watches, and a few notes of nearly worthless local money—they will make good bribes. I pick up the bag, my gun, and stuff my feet into a pair of old boots, before heading off in the direction of the road.

  I crouch in the grass by the roadside for a long time watching a roadblock up ahead. Hidden in a curve of the road, it is hard to see what is beyond and in fact who is manning it, and how many. It is clea
rly unwise to proceed so I decide to use the river. Darting across the road, I drop noiselessly into the water. I need to head upriver, in the direction of the roadblock, because I know beyond it is a town and I might find shelter, but there is no way of getting past the roadblock unseen. Or even of getting across the river to flank it along the other bank. There is also the matter of the boat I saw the other night. If it comes back while I am still visible, it will be the end of me and I can kiss any chance of reuniting with my platoon goodbye. The safest thing to do is to grab hold of one of the corpses, get under it, and float downstream for a while. If I can circle back to the mangroves, I might be able to find an adjacent tributary and use it to make my way back up, closer to the other bank.

  The smell is beyond anything I even have words for. I close my eyes and throw up soundlessly into the water as I float along. Time, in the water, loses all weight and the day passes slowly. Finally, when I think I can no longer ride the cadaver, when I think the smell of death will overwhelm me, when I think it might be better to die than to carry these new memories into life, I feel land under my feet and realize that my macabre craft is being washed ashore onto a sandbank. Still cautious, I push my head up, hand cupped around my ear as though to catch more sound, and listen: for the boat; for people; for danger. Satisfied, I stumble onto the island. In the dim light I can make out the shapes of some huts. This was obviously one of those temporary shelters that fishermen used, like hunters used hunting lodges, to fish out of, smoke their catch, and then head home in the rainy season when the sandbanks were swallowed by the quick-rising water.

  I make my way into one and crawl up into the rafters to keep safe from crocodiles and fall asleep. I dream the moon is the child’s head smiling at me.

  Fish Is a Hand Swimming

  through the Air

  I don’t know how long I’ve been stranded on the sandbank, having lost track of time. Night blends into day blends into night, seamlessly. The sound of distant gunfire reaches me though I feel no need to return to the war. I have lost my taste for death. But I do want to find my platoon. I am a little concerned that it is taking this long to catch up with them. I calculate that I was probably unconscious for a few hours, so they can’t be that far ahead. Of course I have been traveling alone which has meant doubling back and now spending time on this isle. I have probably lost days now, but I am a skilled tracker and should be able to catch them still. I have to get off this shifting island first; but something is keeping me here.

  Life on the sandbank isn’t bad. I have repaired one of the huts reasonably, and my diet of fish is supplemented by a small garden left by one of the fishermen. It has some yams, tomatoes, peppers, and even vegetables. It won’t last much longer though, but for now, like Robinson Crusoe, I am content not to make any plans. Luckily there are several earthenware pots full of rainwater which tastes cool and refreshing, if mildly of earth. Yet even if it tasted brackish, I am glad for it. Drinking the river water, with all the rotting corpses it holds, will surely kill me.

  I sleep in some planks I have rigged up in the rafters. On the ground I would be too vulnerable to the crocodiles that now come boldly onto the sandbank believing it deserted. A few well-placed shots might scare them off, but I am loathe to waste ammo.

  Though I still don’t rest, I sleep a lot now. There isn’t much else to do. Long deep nights where my dreams are treks across star-spangled deserts with my dead comrades and relatives calling in the distance just out of reach. Always out of reach. Lazy siestas, the sun tickling me through the holes in the thatch, weevils causing dust to fall, waking me up sneezing. But even in daylight, even in these siestas, I am plagued by vivid nightmares. I always wake up sweating, the dreams leaving a tangy bitter aftertaste for hours.

  I stretch and head for the water, distracting myself by trying to fish without a line, dribbling a string of saliva into the water like Grandfather taught me. I have been trying it for days without much luck, but today feels different. The string of saliva sets up gentle ripples and bubbles in the water not unlike those caused by a fish. Soon the catfish beneath me slows to a halt, whiskers reading the water for the intruder. Half hypnotized, it just floats there, senses deflected from the shadows above. My hand snakes out with the speed of a cobra and catches the fat catfish behind its head. I pull it out and slam it on the bank once.

  It dies.

  The Soul Has No Sign

  I build a fire and slowly roast the fish. I love the smell—the dry crackle of its oil dribbling into the fire, its scent of mud and something else. It reminds me of home, of warm gari soaking in sea-salted water and the damp funk of the Cross River sweating against its banks.

  When it is cooked, I eat slowly, the flesh exploding in fluffy pink clouds that taste wistfully of smoke. Every time I eat fish, I remember Grandfather’s story of the lake in the middle of the world and the fish that live there. I can hear his voice in my head now. I can see clearly the night he told me.

  There is a lake in the middle of the world.

  Grandfather said.

  This is the oldest truth of our people. This is the oldest lie.

  A lake of fire and water. This lake is a legend of the Igbo. It is invisible, hidden in a fold in time, but there.

  That day we were fishing on the Cross: a breathtaking river over two miles wide, in many places etched out of the horizon only by the line of palm trees on the opposite bank. It was dotted with sandbanks—many of them a good acre big. These glistening white mounds humped the river every dry season and lasted months, developing a whole ecosystem of water hyacinths, bull rushes, fluorescent white egrets, basking hippos or crocodiles, and fishermen camps.

  There are many tales about how the Cross got its name. There are always many tales here, Grandfather said. Don’t trust any of them, he always cautioned. Trust all of them, he warned. Some say it got its name because the Igbos are Hebrews who wandered down to West Africa from Judea and some of them brought fragments of Christ’s Cross with them. Some say it is because in the past the Igbo used to crucify thieves and murderers on its bank. Some say it was named after the frustrated British engineer who worked for the Colonial Service Works Department. Not that he was named Cross. Just that he refused to make sacrifices to placate the water spirits, so the mother of them, the mami-wata, pushed down every bridge the man tried to build across it to link the first colonial capital of Calabar with the hinterlands. This was long before the capital was moved to Lagos, which I guess had friendlier spirits.

  Eight bridges this unnamed British engineer tried to build, until in frustration he threw down his T-slide and retired to Sussex muttering about “bloody nigger river can’t be crossed, I won’t let it become my cross.” But it did. He carried it around Sussex until mami-wata came for him on his deathbed, or so I imagine. Still, the Cross flowed: a magnificent river.

  Canoes; some no bigger than single-person kayaks, others bordering on small schooners and ships, glided up and down the river, skating like dragonflies, propelled by the powerful pull of oars or poles exerted by knotted biceps.

  That was a special night: the gentle slap of the water on wood, the rustle of drying salt, the calls of river birds, the strange hippo barks, and the ticklish smell of the herbs burning gently to drive away mosquitoes wove magic around my senses.

  I trailed my fingers in the water, sifting as if for a morsel of archaic wisdom carried by the river’s memory. Grandfather said this river was older than Job.

  “In the Bible?” I asked.

  “Yes,” he said, smiling.

  He said when the earth was young and this land still a dream, the river cut its path through a mountain, a tear of sweat racing down a giant’s face.

  “How do you know?”

  “Because it speaks to me. Hush, listen.”

  I couldn’t hear anything.

  Neither of us paid much attention as we drifted down the delta to the mouth of the sea. I must have fallen asleep, fingers still trawling the water for wisdom, because I woke
to the dry rasp of a tongue on my fingers. Startled and unsure what creature it was, I drew my fingers back with a yelp. A dolphin clicked at me in laughter, dousing me with salty water as though in benediction, and vanished in a white spray for the ocean.

  “Lucky boy. What a blessing,” Grandfather said. “That dolphin has just taken your soul for safekeeping—always.”

  “My soul? Does that mean I will never die?”

  “Maybe.”

  That was when he told me about the sacred lake with the pillar, half-water, half-fire, all woman.

  “We believe we were the first sentient beings in the universe. Our father, Amadioha, sent a bolt of lightning down to strike a silk cotton tree and the tree split open revealing man and woman. But after Amadioha made men, they ran wild with the lust of power in their noses. Who knows why? Maybe Amadioha wasn’t skilled in making people, all his manifestations seem as though made by a mid-tier elemental. So, God, not Amadioha, sent down its essence. It descended as a pillar: half-fire, half-water. It descended to and arose from the surface of a dark lake in the center of the earth. This new deity we call Idemilli. To control our excess and ensure our evolution, Idemilli took all the power from men. Now, to enter into the confines of power we have to be deemed worthy enough by the guardian.”

  “And what does this guardian look like?”

  “She is a woman all fire and water and more brilliant than a thousand suns; at least those who have been lucky to see her say so.”

  “Why is she a woman?”