Song for Night

by Chris Abani

  “Because she has to be.”

  “Tell me more about the lake. Does it still exist?”

  “Some say it always has, in some dimensional warp.”

  “Have you ever seen it?”

  “Even if I had, you wouldn’t believe me and I wouldn’t tell you.”

  “Does everyone know about the lake?” I asked.

  “No.”

  “Is it sacred?”

  “Very. It is the repository of human souls who are yet to gain access into the world: a source of great power for any dibia who enters there. Legend says that the fish in the lake guard the souls, swallowed deep in their bellies.”

  “Why the fish?”

  “Because the ancestors are concerned with the living, angels with the running of the universe, and neither elementals nor men can be trusted.”

  “And this lake is real?”

  “Very.”

  “But it sounds like a tall tale.”

  “It is.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Nobody does. Everybody does. It is real because it is a tall tale. This lake is the heart of our people. This lake is love. If you find it, and find the pillar, you can climb it into the very heart of God,” he said.

  “Where is this lake, Grandfather?”

  He tapped me on the breastbone.

  “Here. It is at the center of you, because you are the world.”

  “How will I find it?”

  He taught me a song. We sang it over and over, together, for the rest of the night until I couldn’t tell where his voice ended and mine began, and where mine ended and the river began and where the river ended and my blood began.

  But I have forgotten that song. I wish I hadn’t because I think it would bring me much comfort to sing it. Oh well, I think, eating the last of the fish, wondering whose soul I can taste smoking down to my stomach, and if anyone has eaten mine yet.

  Ghosts Are a Gentle Breath

  over Moving Fingers

  Whatever I am dreaming about wakes me dripping with sweat. Judging from the light, it is midafternoon. I jump down and walk outside, surveying the banks to make sure there are no basking crocodiles. The bank is clear, but I can’t be sure of the water, so I throw some fish I caught earlier into different parts of the river, watching closely for any ripple that would indicate the presence of the water leopards. Everything is perfectly still. Placing my rifle on the edge of the bank, I dive in. The water is tepid. Not too different from the temperature outside. I swim for a while, trying to wash the stale sweat off, and the bad dreams with it: difficult without soap. Noticing what looks like a log floating past, I race for the sandbank. Better safe.

  I dry slowly in the dying embers of the sun, and as the water evaporates a slight chill wrinkles my skin. For some reason, I feel like I am being kept here on the sandbank by some spirit’s still unfulfilled wish. It is a stupid superstition but something I feel strongly nonetheless, despite the fact that there has been no proof of it. An egret lands nearby and studies me with curious eyes. I feel a breeze across the river’s face and look up. A canoe drifts slowly past, a skeleton piloting it. I shiver, suppressing an urge to scream. Sometimes my childishness still plagues me.

  The canoe becomes entangled in some lilies growing in a green and white cluster, and though the tides are pulling at it, I know because the lilies are nodding their white heads in time that the boat will not dislodge. The skeleton sways back and forth with the boat’s motion and it makes me think of an elaborate decoration on a Swiss clock. There is a cobweb between the bony arm and the empty chest. It is beautiful and shimmers in the fading light. I wonder how long this poor soul has been lost, even as I admire the cobweb, thinking it reminds me of another time. Of the doilies and small caps I used to crochet all those years ago.

  I reach out my hand and try to touch the spider’s web. It is perfect. But I can’t reach it. Just as well, I think, catching myself. For all I know, this could be a booby trap. The enemy knows our reverence for death and its ritual and could have just sent this downriver intentionally. I examine the bones. There is no way to know what he, or she, died of. Standing up, I back away from the boat and gather some pebbles of varying size and weight and then lob them at the canoe. If it were booby-trapped, this would set off any bombs. Satisfied that it is clean, I walk over to one of the huts and pull a long pole from its roof, and with great difficulty I maneuver the canoe aground.

  Leaving it for a while, I dig a shallow grave in the shifting sand, knowing it will be washed away in next year’s flood. But that is unimportant. What is important is that this person be buried. Be mourned. Be remembered. Even for a minute. Before I take the skeleton out of the canoe, I reach in and pull the cobweb gently free. I drape it over my head like a cap and then lift the skeleton with ease, careful not to shake any bones loose. To come back complete, it is important that one leave complete. Laying it in the grave, I cover it hurriedly and say a soft prayer and play “Taps” on my harmonica. It is the least I can do.

  There are so many restless spirits here. Maybe this is why I am dallying here, delayed by the need of this lonely spirit to find rest. Tomorrow I will leave with the salvaged canoe. That is the way here. I feel the grateful blessing of the spirit in the wind on my cheek.

  “Farewell, friend,” I whisper.

  Truth Is Forefinger to

  Tongue Raised Skyward

  Every star is a soul, every soul is a destiny meant to be lived out. They fill the night sky, revealing like a diviner’s spread the destiny of those gifted in reading their drift, their endless shift, like a desert, revealing and burying the way alternately.

  I have killed many people during the last three years. Half of those were innocent, half of those were unarmed— and some of those killings have been a pleasure. But even with all this, even with the knowledge that there are some sins too big for even God to forgive, every night my sky is still full of stars; a wonderful song for night.

  I sigh and lean back in the canoe. The current has changed direction and is flowing upriver now; inland. The corpses, like a reluctant company of dancers, bump into each other as they hit the sudden swerve of the water, bump into each other and waltz lazily back the way they came. The corpses seem to be mocking me. They seem to say, Don’t worry, you’ll be one of us soon, you’ll join us in this slow dance.

  My Luck is dead.

  This is what my mother would say if I die in this war. I say would because she is already dead; but that is another matter. My Luck: that’s what she named me, fourth son after three daughters, all of whom died of mysterious sicknesses before they were eight. In this culture, a woman who bears only daughters is not worth much to her husband and family: maybe not worth anything. In my family, the women lose a lot of babies. Like Aunt Gladys. I remember the night she came round to our house all bruised up from a beating from her husband. I was only five but I remember it. We were all sitting by the fire outside roasting corn and pears, my father, my mother, and I.

  They talked in muted whispers, my parents and her, in the low glow from the fire, with the shadows riding close by; they looked haunted. Though they were whispering, I could make out that she had somehow lost her baby, and I thought it was careless of Aunt Gladys to lose her baby like that. I mean how can it be in your stomach one minute then lost the next, sailing down a river of red. The last part I had just heard: Aunt Gladys saying it was like a river of red, the blood that gushed from her. It made me think of the chicken we had killed for our Sunday dinner that still had unlaid eggs in her. My father took the eggs out, his eyes sad. I poked them, surprised to find that they were soft like snake eggs, and my stick pierced the soft case of one and the egg burst, revealing a spit of blood and mashed bones and feathers. Father covered it in sand and muttered under his breath.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “Praying. You should too.”

  But I didn’t. I still haven’t: not for any of the lives I have taken. Or the ones I have lo
st. But it was hard to imagine Aunt Gladys’s river of red having small crushed bones and feathers. Does her husband pray even now for the life he took? I was very quiet, even then I said very little. I should have been asleep and it was a rare privilege to be allowed to sit with the grown-ups, so I wasn’t about to mess that up by talking. I looked up from the ground and studied Aunt Gladys crying there and risking everything, then I stood up and came over and curled myself into the small of her back, my tiny arms around her belly. I’ll never forget the sigh she let out. It was like she had taken the last breath of air on the planet but had to let it go.

  “My Luck,” she said. “My Luck, do you know what lonely feels like?”

  I didn’t know. To my five-year-old mind it might have been like losing my puppy or the dirty secondhand teddy I loved so much.

  “No, Aunty,” I said.

  “Lonely is a cold, itchy back,” she said.

  I laughed and snuggled closer, one hand scratching her back through her thin blouse. She sighed happily and my parents laughed. I keep that night close, like a well-worn photograph of family, of a time when we were happy. My father died shortly after that night, and my uncle, my father’s half-brother, became my father and my mother became his mistress, and I the burden that stared at him daily with a malevolence he couldn’t beat out of me.

  I stretch and lean further back and stare into night, the wood of the canoe hard against my back like a hand. A little fire burns in the leaking metal pail I found on the sandbank. I filled it with hot coals and kindling and set it in a wet block of wood in the center of the canoe; the way I had seen Grandfather do so many times. It would keep me warm this cold night, and the light, too faint to be seen from the bank, was enough to comfort me in that river of the dead. Fire and starlight and the wood of the boat; and something else—hope that I will find home in the morning. Thinking of Aunt Gladys, I know now of course that she was right. The heart is not where we feel loneliness. It is in the back. I press mine harder against the wood behind me, but it is cold and wet from the river. With drooping eyes I watch the fire die.

  Mercy Is a Palm Turning

  Out from the Heart

  This woman’s eyes are cold and hard and dark like onyx and I wake straight into that gaze. One that reveals nothing and flinches from nothing; if I am death, she is ready. If I mean no harm, she will ignore me; I hope. My gesture is one of supplication and if she understands it, she doesn’t show it. Her gaze takes in my torn clothes, my haggard face, and the gun, and also the scapular that has come loose. I can’t make out what she is thinking.

  I hesitate, letting her gaze wander over me as I scan the bank for any signs of other people. She appears to be alone. I return my eyes to her and search her for weapons. All she has is a long pole with a makeshift metal hook on the end. A bag stands by her feet and I see it is filling up with loot. Rings, watches, compacts, a handbag, some good shoes, jewelry, and with a shudder I realize what she is doing, or was doing before she happened upon me. She uses the hook to pull bodies onto the shore and robs them of their valuables. It is despicable what she is doing, I think, and wonder if I drifted into the bank or whether she pulled the canoe in with the intent of robbing me. Ghoul. At least when I rob, I rob the living, I think, feeling superior to her. But if she is ashamed by her profession, nothing in her face reveals it.

  It is a bright day and my broken watch reveals nothing about the time. I can only guess it is about midday. I thank whatever gods or goddesses watched over me while I slept. There is a road behind the woman and I can’t tell if this is the one from yesterday or if I have drifted back to the bank with the roadblock. Nothing looks familiar.

  The woman gives me one final look, makes the sign of the cross, and goes back to fishing for corpses as though she has dismissed me, as though with that token sign she has somehow rendered me invisible.

  “Mother, where am I?” I try to signal, using the generic term for respect. But either she can’t see me anymore, doesn’t understand, or doesn’t want to. I get out of the canoe and walk toward her. She pauses and turns to look at me; the sun is directly in my face and I am squinting. She hesitates, then spits, almost shouting, “Tufia!” the old word for banishing spirits or bad things. I smile and something in my face softens her, and for a minute her eyes are pure tenderness and the look unsettles me, brings back memories of the first woman I raped, a woman her age, and I stumble back confused, wondering if she is real or if she is a ghost, an apparition drawn by the river goddess mami-wata from my guilt; to punish me. As I stagger back from her, my mind staggers back in time, but fragments are all I stumble over.

  John Wayne was yelling at me. There were villagers running in panic. There were houses and huts burning. Also granaries. Bullets from indiscriminate guns cut down plants, animals, and people. The platoon was screaming. Ijeoma, the only girl among the attackers, stood to one side, watching, too afraid perhaps to cry. But something moved behind her eyes. John Wayne and I were standing in a room. A woman huddled under the bed. Why do they do that? I thought. Hiding under a bed never saved anyone. John Wayne pulled her out and threw her on the bed. Ripping her clothes off, he ordered me to rape her. I hesitated.

  “You are the only one who hasn’t raped anyone yet!” he barked at me.

  I wanted to ask him what this skirmish, this fight, this destruction of an innocent village had to do with our mission to defuse mines, but I knew better. I looked at the woman. My hesitation puzzled her and she stopped crying. John Wayne was angry at my insubordination and he pointed his gun at my head.

  “Rape or die,” he said, and I knew he meant it. As I dropped my pants and climbed onto the woman, I wondered how it was that I had an erection. Some part of me was enjoying it and that perhaps hurt me the most. I entered the woman and strangely she smiled. I moved, and as much as I wanted to pretend, I couldn’t lie, I enjoyed it. The woman’s eyes were tender, as if all she saw was a boy lost. She stroked my hair tenderly, whispering as I sobbed: “It’s all right son, it’s all right. Better the ones like you live.” When I came, John Wayne laughed and put two rounds into the woman’s head, spraying my face with her blood. The woman died with that look of absolute tenderness in her eyes.

  Ijeoma found me. She knew, but she had too much grace to say anything. That night, in the rubble of that village, while the others roasted a goat, she washed the blood from my face.

  “You have the taste now,” she said.

  I nodded. I knew what she meant. I was thirteen, armed and lost in a war with the taste for rape.

  “I will save you,” she said.

  And she did. She became my girlfriend and that night and every night after that, whenever we raided a town or a village, while the others were raping the women and sometimes the men, Ijeoma and I made desperate love, crying as we came, but we did it to make sure that amongst all that horror, there was still love. That it wouldn’t die here, in this place.

  I return to the moment of that woman’s look and the look this woman is giving me here at the riverbank. I turn from her and run through the thick patch of tall grass on the bank, across the road, and make for the forest. I can still feel her eyes on me. I decide to rest and move closer to the town that must be nearby under the cover of darkness.

  I climb a tree and doze.

  Dreaming Is Hands Held

  in Prayer over the Nose

  Maybe this is true. That there are some of us who give love and some of us who take love; and that those who give can’t help giving just as those who take can’t help taking; and maybe this is what holds the world in balance.

  I dream my hate comes back and she is a woman made of night dancing in the middle of a lake I have seen only in Grandfather’s stories and she has claws of fire and breath of ice and her laughter, as she turns in dance, is a band tight as a vice across my heart choking life from it, and as I am gasping for breath all I can think is, What a thing of beauty she is, what a thing. Then a light breaks in the east, over the lake, and approaches, an o
rb smaller than a star but no less bright. I see it is Ijeoma and she opens her arms and the woman made of my hate fills her, slowly extinguishing her light, and she falls from the sky, and as she falls, her light fading, the band around my chest loosens and I see her smile so sadly yet so full of love.

  I wake to darkness. Breathing heavily I fumble for a cigarette and stick one in my mouth. In a fleeting kind of way, I wonder how come this pack never seems to run out, but then a deeper thought takes hold.

  I need to find that town and my platoon.

  I want to say a prayer for Ijeoma, but I feel silly. It is only a dream. I shake it off and head back to the road. In the dark it looks like it might lead to the underworld.

  Shit.

  Town Is Hands Making Boxes in the Air

  A minnow skirting through weeds in a pool, a plane skims trees that ripple like a dense Afro. I pause and listen. From the engine pitch I can tell it isn’t a bomber, probably a Red Cross or reconnaissance plane. Down the dark road, in the distance, the lights of a town beckon and I follow.

  The market, built around a central square, is alive even this late. People move back and forth. Night markets are a common feature of this war—there is no nighttime bombing or strafing. I stop by a telephone booth, gleaming white and chrome. It is growing out of a pile of baskets that houses angry chickens. There is no receiver and it most likely hasn’t worked since the war started. An interloper, it is regarded suspiciously by the sheep grazing on the rubbish spewed by the market: tin cans, paper, cellophane, fruit peels, rotten yams. The road across the market is a dirt track, mined with potholes. As I make my way through the throng of people shopping, or looking to steal, scents chase after me: goats, chickens, open sewers, muddy earth, dry thatch, rotting fruit, and vegetables.

  I leave the market, crossing a small bridge humping a tired stream. Under a mango tree, in the deeper shadows, cows drink from the belly of a canoe sailing on a pile of sand. Everywhere, madmen and mendicants call. Children: bulbous heads pendulous over hunger-distended bellies with eyes washed out like the earth here. I stop in front of a flaking, dusty building. Somewhere inside, a generator hacks in coughy spurts and the lights flicker in sympathy. A worn sign announces: Die Hard Motel and Eatery. I make to enter, but lying across the threshold, dry, brown, dead, and molting, is a lizard. I hesitate. Lizards are sometimes seen as symbols of rebirth, but every rebirth requires a death. I hover on the porch and an old man hunched in the corner sees the lizard and me, and smiling says: “Faith is not a gift. It is earned.”